


Timaios under the weather

by Budinca



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Human/Troll Society, Anxiety Disorder, Body Horror, Mental Instability, Multi, POV Multiple, Panic Attacks, Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2017-12-24 15:00:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/941343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Budinca/pseuds/Budinca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world in which human and troll societies have been forced to intermingle, the last, ultimate breaking point is steadily approaching.<br/>Whether it is the exploding ecto-factories, the recklessly dispatched militia, the plague spreading through the land, or the fact that the government seems unscrupulously set on retrieving a stolen AI unit, all signs point to something bigger.<br/>If only there was someone clear-headed enough to see them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pompeii

**Author's Note:**

> Hi :)  
> Here we have a weird work-in-progress which will probably make more sense as the story advances.  
> Thank you for being patient with me and, I assure you, I'm way more scared of this than you are.

Western wind and liquid ice under slippery feet; it was not John’s lucky day. Ahead, the narrow mountain path was drenched in grey fog that clung to the stones and made walking even more perilous. There was no light anymore; just a pale grey haze being reflected in the almost static water in the air, after the sun had descended behind the mountains. Behind, John could still feel the blaze of the burning, crumbling city warm his back. He could still hear the stones falling, the glass breaking. They weren’t faint sounds carried miles away by the wind; they were loud echoes that made his head ring still, hours after he’d gone away.

Rose heaved at his side and he stopped, got a better grip around her waist, and kept going. She had been drifting in and out of consciousness the entire day, mainly because of the shock and effort, but also because she’d been clean for almost a week. Putting one foot in front of the other and hoping his old boots would be enough for him not to fall over the edge of the mountain, John made a mental inventory of all the things they possessed at the moment.

He was going to the market when the bombing had started, so he was fully dressed in his old uniform and also had two of his best knives on him. There were probably herbs for Rose’s throat in his pockets along with the money with which he had planned to buy food. Thankfully, he could feel the PDA in his jacket.

Looking at their situation with this list in his head, John understood that they were as good as dead unless the fog died down. The water’s been too thick for over a century, ever since the first wars, even though nobody understood what exactly had forced it to change. Now it couldn’t turn to solid ice or snow anymore and both the rain and the fog had a sickly marmalade-ish state of aggregation. It made it hard to breathe, but then again, they wouldn’t be the first ones to drown in mist.

Rose’s almost limp form started to cough and John swore, ducking into an alcove in the stone and holding her by the shoulders until she got some strength into her feet. Then he started checking his pockets for her make-believe medicine. They both knew the herbs weren’t curing her, but at least they let her regain her voice. John swore again; his fingers were numb with the cold.

“Where are we?” Rose asked, visibly trying to stay conscious and blinking at their grey surroundings. They were at least 900 miles high, but the fog and the lack of light didn’t give them any glimpse of the lands below, which was just as good; Rose was afraid of heights. Or so she’d been, before she’d grown afraid of everything. Her violet eyes sought John’s. “Who are you?”

He got a hold of a few dry leaves; he would need those soon enough, judging from the black rings growing around her eyes. “I am John,” he stated clearly, like always, and she sighed. Usually, her memory needed a few moments to adjust to her age. She could have been 10 years old for all she knew until then. “They demolished the city, so we’re moving. We have five more hours to go.” John looked at her and at her darkening skin and wished she wouldn’t ask any more questions and just let it go. 

“What happened?” Rose’s head swayed this way and that and she seemed to have trouble swallowing.

Everything around them was too wet to strike a fire. “Midday warning. We thought they were only gonna probe us, but it turned out they had explosives. They had them hidden in the walls—”

It only took another gulp of mist. Rose doubled over and, clutching her stomach, began to throw up. First water and possibly the day’s before bread, then blackness and swollen, magenta rings of flesh. John caught her shoulders before she could fall in the puddle. And she still threw up, black goo running down her fingers as she tried to stop it.

When it was finished, the skin around her eyes was the right, human colour and her hands and shoes were drenched, but she was still conscious. John cleaned the zone around her mouth with the back of his hand and then pressed the crushed leaves on her tongue. She squirmed under his hands and he knew, they were bitter and sharp and felt like acidic almond oil, but she had to ingest them.

“I could’ve stayed there,” she breathed after swallowing a few times. John dismissed the statement by simply tugging her out of the black slosh. It smelt like decay.

“No, you couldn’t have,” and when she tried to say something else, he put his arm around her again. “Let’s go. A few more hours.”

As they walked along the slippery, rocky path, John felt the things inside her move against his hand, under her skin and he bit the inside of his cheek to not let go of her. He saw her looking at the paler greyness on one side of them and thought the same thing she probably did. Falling over would be easier than living, not only for her, but for him too. Still, they were both too used to life, however discouraging it seemed to be. It was a hard habit to give up on.

It couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours later when John first saw the tips of the forest ahead of them. The fog was thinning and, once they’d passed the forest, the way to the second city was just another three hours away. They could do it until morning. 

Then, halfway from the mountainside to the forest, he saw the globes of light in the distance that meant electric torches and then he heard them coming closer and, shit, Rose had fainted again. They didn’t have time to run.

“Don’t move.”

There were six of them; paid sentinels on the lookout for anything suspicious or wrong or defiant. The men were clad in new uniforms, a sign that the regency hadn’t sent them here long ago, intimidating at a first glance but not nearly as reliable as John’s three-layered, ex-agent ensemble. His clothes were so worn out that there was no risk of recognition involved. Besides, it wasn’t exactly a uniform. A hundred years after the wars and people were still stealing clothes from one another.

John’s eyes swivelled around the six of them. He could break every bone in their bodies in a matter of minutes. He could skin them all alive in just a little more than that. But what if there were cameras watching from their surroundings? What if one of these men had the chance to sound an alert? It would all be for nothing. John raised his free arm and faced them.

\---

The Eastern wind clawing at the thin sheets lying over him was enough for Dave to say good-bye to his beauty sleep. If beauty could be achieved by lying for four hours in a bed in a window-smashed apartment in the lower town, he sure would’ve been the one to discover that fact. They really needed to buy a new window; or just move into another derelict house. They would probably sooner do the latter.

Strider got up, put his watch on his wrist and his gun in its holder and threw a shoe exquisitely resembling a dead rat on the other bed. “Wakey-wakey,” he muttered as groans could be heard under those sheets. Feeling his ankle bare under his trousers, Dave remembered to retrieve the knife from the bathroom and strap it back on. It took him significantly less to brush his teeth.

“You know what?” Vantas stared blankly at him when he returned to the main room and Strider raised an appropriate eyebrow to urge him on. He wondered if they had anything left to drink. “I think you’re a sad, over-powered shit with a godhead complex.” The effect was stifled by a yawn.

“Man, next time, I’ll let you write my resume for the clients,” Dave opened the drawer and snatched a white shirt, a bullet-proof wifebeater and a three-layered jacket. Carbon, cotton and liquid steel, nobody had it better than underground agents. “Are you coming to eat or what?”

Karkat threw his feet over the bed and grumbled at the light from outside. “It’s fucking raining,” he announced intelligently, stretching his back without making any of his weird tendons pop. Strider would never get other species. Even his own was a mystery for him.

“Such astute observations so early in the morning,” he lastly put on his jacket and took out his tracking device. Nice and slick and rubbery, but completely electronic. “Hurry up, I want to see the news.”

“Fuck off, Strider, nobody’s stupid enough to listen to their programme anymore.” Still, he was already half-dressed and, once he’d thrown a cardigan and his own jacket over himself, he was ready to go too.

Dave pushed the device in an inside pocket and smirked at his partner. “But it’s still cute to see them try, right?”

They descended the steps of the seven storeys without bumping into anyone this time. Most people were either at the market or trading pharmaceuticals or a couple of miles beneath the ground, working. The building was a few centuries old and everything was either dry and crumbling or mouldy and crumbling. The white lime was sticking to the soles of their combat boots.

Then they got to the street-level and Karkat squinted at the harsh light of the street lamps. Tall and using more energy than a two-room apartment each, these never seemed to be shut down lately, even though the cloudy sky was still giving them enough light. Jelly water was falling on the pavement.

Dave followed him across the street and into a rundown cafe, where some workers were already hanging around round tables, drinking caffeinated water or whatever the fuck they had the money to pay for at the moment. Up on a wall, the news programme was projected and he analysed it while Karkat bribed the bartender into using some real eggs for their omelettes.

“Look, it’s the iron lady,” he joked and patted the other’s shoulder to gain his attention. The iron lady was a human newscaster who was only used to voice out threatening material or dubious warnings. Truth be told, aggressive news were always better than the mellow shits they usually displayed.

Karkat frowned at her expressionless face and retrieved the mug of hot blue energizer the bartender prepared for him. “What the fuck does she want, she’s only been on air two days ago,” he asked after taking a mouthful.

The last time she’d been on the television, she had announced a lowering of wages for the workers from the lower and middle classes and pleaded for all the citizens to bear in mind that the punishments for inadequate behaviour were still standing. It didn’t stop people from raging on the streets about their payment and, thus, another couple thousands died in less than two days.

“Who knows, maybe she just wanted to show her new coiffure,” Dave smirked at her projection, mostly at the electronic tips hanging at the base of her hairline. Poor chap, she must have really wanted a promotion.

Their food arrived and, thankfully, it was yellow-white instead of grey, so they brought it to a table. Karkat was too busy examining his scrambled eggs for memory-chips to hear the actual news, but as the woman went on, Dave let his eyebrows rise higher and higher. There was a void silence hanging around the cafe and he could hear the same transmission being broadcasted on the street too.

“Dude.”

Karkat raised his face and immediately frowned when he saw his expression. “What?”

“They bombarded Pompeii.”

“They _what_?” Somebody shushed them from a nearby table. They were still waiting for more, but nothing came, so Dave went back to his report. The silence around went on.

“And they shut three quarters of the ectobiology farms.”

Karkat snorted. “That’s bullshit. They couldn’t have.”

“Did too.”

“Whatever,” the troll dismissed the topic over a mouthful of eggs. “They didn’t say why, right? They don’t even bother with that anymore. Not an election year, no shits given.”

The programme showed multiple factories being blasted off the face of the planet in giant clouds of smoke and dust. Dave was under the impression that he saw slime in that air too, but it too was black, so he could not tell. Then they showed the walls of Pompeii falling and its marble buildings starting to burn.

“What the fuck did they do that for?” Karkat hissed at him, mug forgotten halfway to his mouth.

Strider’s lips formed a thin line across his face, white with restrained anger. “Threw a dart across the map and that’s where it landed, I imagine.” He raised a hand to his mouth. “Jesus fuck, they’re such idiots. There was nothing for them there. At least they could have done that for resources!”

The programme was back to its normal routine now, another presenter recalling the sad incident of the other days (e.g. the deaths of thousands, no big deal) and then bringing to the public’s attention the latest invention available on the market. Dave’s eyes caught a glitch and it had said OBEY. He went back to his food.

\---

The Southern currents had brought freezing weather overnight and it was just a testament of his luck that Jake English was on morning duty. The wind was bringing a dull ache to his leg; what was left of it. What could he even do so early in the day? Feed the squirrels? Yes, for a fact, that was exactly what he was doing at the moment. Over 90% of Earth’s animal species have been brought to or near extinction in the past 200 years and the others still had to recover from the shock. No wonder one couldn’t grab a nut off a branch like a man anymore.

Jake wondered yet again when people were going to realise that the lack of animals was more damaging that whatever civil wars they were fighting in or against. They had tried to solve everything through engineering and artificial means, but that was just a temporary method and they couldn’t see that even now. He hadn’t had breakfast. That was the problem.

“There you go, little fellow,” he smiled and let the slightly undersized squirrel jump down from his hand. Then, proceeding with his usual walk, he kept leaving small, dried nuts beneath the inhabited trees.

A few miles away from the cabins, he saw a deer and that put his mind to ease. The forest was 100 miles wide, starting on the plains and reaching the mountains, but, as far as Jade had counted, there were only three deer. Which was three more than could be encountered until the far North. It was a good thing to know that they hadn’t killed each other during their stay. Must have been Tavros’s influence. Jake had to remember to give the guy some praise.

He was on his way back to the encampment, once again marvelling at how little noise Jade’s prosthetic managed to make despite all odds, when a light rustling made him stop and his hands went instantly to the two guns resting at his sides. Rustling in a forest ought to be a good sign, since it meant life or wind, which was still good, but there were too many patrols being deployed all over the place lately. And they weren’t all very dedicated to their job of keeping peace. The last ones had visited some months before and Jake couldn’t forget the uncanny feeling they gave him. Something was very wrong with those ones.

Jake said nothing then and said nothing now, choosing to turn lightly towards the source and wait, one hand occupied with a loaded gun. After a long pause, he saw a hint of artificial grey and heard a branch being broken on the ground. Whatever was coming his way, it was not very big, which was both a relief and a disappointment. A tiny bit of him was hoping he would have to match with a tiger-lusus or something of that calibre. More crunching and Jake narrowed his eyes at a glint of golden yellow. Not a lusus.

But it was alive; he could hear its heavy breathing. Taking a deep gulp of air himself, Jake straightened his back and raised his armed arm towards the approaching being, waiting for it to come into view. Whatever it was, it seemed to know that he was waiting, since it stopped for a moment before pushing the low branches that hid it from view and stepping forward.

A beat had been missed before Jake English blinked. Would you look at that, it was human. He felt his gun arm lowering and caught himself in time, keeping it straight ahead again. It simply being human didn’t mean it was any less dangerous. Quite the contrary. On another train of thought, time for a pronoun change. This was obviously male. And bleeding. Holy shit, there was so much blood.

Jake swallowed hard and, still ready to defend himself if this proved to be a ruse, took a few steps forward. Amber eyes looked up at him when there was merely a metre between them and the hunched form of the stranger waved visibly, but without losing his footing. Well, lucky him, having two legs.

With another inhale, Jake made himself look straight at him and proceed with the norms. “Friend or foe?” This was so stupid, this man was bleeding to death right in front of him.  
It took the other a lot of willpower to open his mouth. “Corpse.” Then the blond drew in a wheezing breath. “...if you’ll just give me a few more minutes.”

Shit. “Are you armed?”

“Shit if I know.” Jake waited. “Probably,” the other gave in and began to shiver.

He ought to search him, Jake thought before a new wave of red blood started dripping through the other’s fingers on his stomach and his only notion became that of fuck it. Thinking briefly of the scolding Jade was going to throw his way if he even reached the camp alive, Jake returned the gun to its holster.

“I’ll take your word not to shoot me,” he said as he put the stranger’s arm over his shoulders and he was convinced the look directed his way was the one of I never gave you my word for anything, but, as he’d said, fuck it.

\---

When he woke up, John did his best to get alert on the spot. The ground was shaking and it was so dark and he didn’t know where Rose was. He was also aware of the absence of his hunting knife at his side and that was most unfortunate seeing as his hands were tied together tightly. This was so wrong.

Just after his eyes had got used to the darkness well enough for him to understand that he was in a military vehicle, this rousing all his nerves, so fast and so hard he suddenly felt sick, a door opened and somebody pushed Rose inside. He was up on his feet before he had the opportunity to consider his actions and he almost fell over.

“Rose? Rose! Are you alright?” John asked and tried in vain to free his hands. She came over to him and pushed him back down.

“I’m alright,” she said and her tone made it easier to believe. For once, her voice sounded almost like it used to. It also made her seem angry and confused about something. “I hope they get infected,” she spat out, confirming John’s unhad thoughts and a wave of disgust hit the back of his throat. “John.” Rose felt the anger in him. He had to swallow it all up and calm down.

“Will you,” he choked. “I mean...what if you...” By the air he was breathing, this was so utterly wrong. Where had he been? How could he have left her alone with those mad sentinels? What had they hit him with to make him pass out?

Rose pressed her weight on his side. Calming. “I’m not going to get pregnant. What could live along with those things in there?” she tried to laugh, then sighed. “Besides, I know how to get rid of it if I have to.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Whatever for? They would have raped me whether you knew about it or not,” she chuckled and it made him sick to his stomach.

“Not if I killed them first.” Rose shushed him, so he began to whisper. “I should have done that. I’m sorry.” What had happened during that day that it seemed to never end? Or maybe it had. Maybe it was morning.

“It’s all right now. They’re going to let us go once we get into the city.” It was morning. Pompeii had fallen less than 24 hours before and John could still feel the rocks scratching his arms in their leaps through the air. “They took your knife, though.”

“I have another one,” John groaned and tried to see something in the dark. “Any idea how long until we get there?” He was so tired.

When the vehicle shook less, Rose touched her forehead to his. “Half an hour or less. They had to wait until I regained consciousness.”

John gritted his teeth. There was nothing he could do right now. At least they would get inside the city.

\---

The thing about Karkat Vantas was that he was either embarrassingly good or notoriously bad at everything he did. There was no in between. Dave Strider had learnt this in the past five years of partnership and had eventually decided it was a good thing.

At the moment, Karkat was inventing the world’s shittiest way of packing up guns and squeezing them in a bag. It was so shitty Dave almost shed a tear of pride before making a sarcastic remark. He shouldn’t have done that. He got a bullet to the head; an unloaded one.

After the morning news, they had decided that fleeing this city was the best plan. People ought to have something for them to do during this crisis. If not, they could just go underground and wait for an opportunity to arise. The only bad thing was the stink of unused sewers.

“Do you have a train ticket?” Dave asked as they both picked their stuffed bags off the floor.

Karkat looked behind him to see if anything was left behind, then glanced at the overlit panorama outside of the broken window before turning back to him. “I still have that pass from Eridan. It should work.”

At this hour, the stairway was packed with people and everyone was talking about the bombing and making new conspiracy theories with an amusing lack of interest. “Were he to know he’d be helpful even in death, he would be rolling in his grave.”

“I don’t think he got a grave...” Karkat mused as they turned a corner.

Dave thought about it for a moment before shrugging. You don’t get that much of a grave when the royal guards catch you spying. It’s more like...a discreet scattering of flesh and bone around the sewers. That coming after being shot in the chest 16 times, of course.

They ducked on a side street with black walls and then on another, until the lamp’s light couldn’t reach them anymore. Karkat kicked some rubbish aside and raised the barred lid resting in the ground soundlessly.

Dave ducked inside and started climbing down the metal ladder there. The real subway entrances were secured from all passengers by 20 feet of concrete. It wasn’t like anybody knew what a subway was anymore except for a few individuals, so no harm had been done there.

The air in the station was sharp and cold and smelled strongly of concrete, but at least there were fewer, dimmer lamps, unlike on the streets above. Karkat blinked full of gratitude at the newfound darkness while Dave took his aviators off with a sigh. 

“Which one?”

Vantas took out his phone and looked at its slick interface. “We should visit Captor; see if he has any offers.” The other snorted. “Shut up, you know we have to go there!”

After watching the troll seethe at him for a few moments, Dave grinned and wriggled his eyebrows. “Ow.” He should have expected that blow.

The train came rattling over the centuries-old rail, with its lights off and its wagons empty. Dave lagged behind as the other went to the conductor and presented him the pass, then got on the first wagon as the door screeched open. 

The long, moving tunnel of the subway train, flanked with moth-eaten chairs always had the ability to creep him out. It was very hard to imagine people sitting on these on a daily basis, going to work or who knows what they used to do then. Still; old shit was Vantas’s hobby, not his. He only had his moments. Dave succumbed into a crumbling chair.

\---

Despite not being a particularly finicky guy, Jake really didn’t like his day. His shoulder hurt by now, his right-leg’s prosthetic was whinging under the added weight and he could feel blood trickling through his fingers. He hadn’t had any business with blood that wasn’t his own in ages; it reminded him of the days when he could still go out of this place and do something more stimulating. There was only so far a leg of pipes and nails could get you. On the bright side, they had almost reached the cabins and Jade was nowhere in sight.

“Are you still alive there, buddy?” he asked, voice cracking in the weirdest spots. 

His eyes were fixed on the burnt shade of brown of the one-storey houses, urging his feet to move faster. But this guy was so heavy. A few miles of carrying a body sure made said body gain a few pounds in one’s perspective. Jake had tried to make him leave his bag somewhere in a tree from where they could retrieve it later, but that had started a really passionate speech about possession that was quickly ended by a blood-coughing fit.

The other raised his head and, if he even saw anything anymore, he must have seen the cabins too, because he sighed. “I’ll make it.”

Jake nodded, then an awkward half-laugh escaped from his throat. “I don’t know if that’s wise. My boss will probably want to kill us both once we get there.” It was too close to the truth to be funny.

“Decent skills with a gun?” the stranger inquired and Jake had to give it to him for still being up for conversation after all that blood loss.

“The best! Jade fought in the Winter War,” he answered proudly.

“A chick, huh...” Another wet cough splattered the ground in front of them.

Jake tried to adjust his weight without producing any more damage, then inhaled deeply. “Don’t worry, she’ll probably let you recover before shooting you.”

“Ten stars out of ten.” Then he stopped. “I’ll pass out now.”

“What? No, just hang on a bit, it’s just a couple more—” Dead weight. Yep, that guy sure kept his word. Jake stopped, got a better grip around him, and walked the rest of the short distance to the front door.

\---

Keeping still while the patrol untied his hands had used up all of John’s composure that morning, so after asking three merchants about a doctor and not getting a straight answer, he almost yelled at one of them. It would have been an incredibly stupid move, risking them getting too much attention, so he was very grateful when Rose stepped in and asked another woman the way.

John had taken in a few deep breaths and followed her after that. It was an awful situation, but he hadn’t seen Rose acting so close to normal in months. For a few moments, he started thinking that maybe she was getting better. Maybe they got infected and now she was clean. Then, he got his feet back on the ground; this was just a temporary state. The most he could hope for was for her not to throw up buckets of black water the rest of the week.

The official pharmaceutical building was a semi-renovated music shop, which was as weird and cool as it could get. Still, the mature side of John, the one he’d harnessed for years, even before and after he’d resigned from his agent “job”, felt it necessary to point out to him that a health house should be found in more appropriate locations. He wanted to say fuck you to that side, but then he remembered who he was and what he had to do. He knocked on the door.

It took nearly no time for it to be opened, which caught him by surprise. A tall troll-woman looked inquiringly at him, then at Rose. “Health issues?”

“Just an examination,” John looked straight in her jade-tinted eyes, half-waiting for a rejection, but she only opened the door wider. “Thank you.”

“Our pleasure. If you’d just take a seat while the doctor finishes with the current patient,” she showed them to a very old couch and Rose marched over before he had the chance to sigh.  
From inside, the health house was really small and looking quite the opposite of sterile, but this city was not as developed as Pompeii. Back there, they even had sandstone floors. Old, but looking more hygienic. This place looked like a ruin somebody had worked very hard to keep clean. John fretted his hands. It could be worse, he said to himself for the thousandth time.

“Kanaya, I’m not a doctor, stop raising the patients’ expectations,” a short-haired woman said from a few feet aware, where she was finishing bandaging an old man’s arm. She smiled up at him. “All done, sir. Please come back next week for a control.” The man nodded, handed her a bag of white sheets of paper and got out of the “clinic”.

For no reason at all, John was feeling woozy. He couldn’t see well either, despite still being in possession of his glasses.

“What can I do for you?” the human non-doctor approached them, smile still on her face and rubbing her hands with sanitizer. She seemed to gaze harder for a moment through her oval eyewear. “You’re not from around here, are you? Can’t say for sure why I asked that, oh, well...”

Rose shifted beside him. “We’re from Pompeii,” she answered and got two small intakes of breaths in return. “And I think John needs a calcium shot.”

That almost got his attention. “What? I don’t need–” but the simple movement of his head made the room spin. Right; he’d gone without vitamins for two days now.

The woman in front of him nodded. “Coming right up.” She disappeared behind a door he hadn’t seen at first and left them with the troll nurse. Was she a nurse? It didn’t matter, really.

“Anything I can do for you?” she asked Rose and her voice was soft, comforting, a little strange to hear unguarded in public. But then again, they were the only ones hearing it at the time.

“Pain medication, if you can spare. We got a lift with the night patrol,” Rose answered and John tightened his hands in fists. She was in pain and it was his fault for not being sure of his abilities. If he acted on instinct when they were seen, neither of them would have been hurt. He was a mess.

The nurse’s black lips drew themselves in a thin line. “We’ve tried to get rid of them, but instead we’ve just been sent more. They’re mostly maniacs too. It’s probably because of them that they shut down the ectobiology labs yesterday,” she chatted calmly while retrieving a bottle of pills from a drawer.

“They did _what_?” John snapped into full, painful awareness despite feeling cold sweats all over his body. Yellow stars burst behind his eyes soon after.

The non-doctor returned with a syringe and a small glass container. “Over 50% of the newborns created in laboratories during the past thirty years have proven to develop malfunctions of the brain or body mutations,” she made John take off his jacket and raised his sleeve afterwards, which was just as good, seeing as he was blind and nauseous by now. “Suppose they waited until it was too late,” she jammed the needle into his arm. “Hopefully not. Just let it a few minutes to take effect.”

“A lot of...explosives...for a single day,” John sighed and leant back on the couch, closing his eyes. Black was always better than yellow.

“I suppose so. Were there other survivors after Pompeii?” the nurse asked when Rose finished taking her pills.

“Um...I’m not sure. John...?” she tapped his hand.

“Didn’t look for them, we just ran.”

He heard the other’s voice again, shifting through the room. “We’ve seen the news earlier today and they hadn’t given any reason for the attack. It’s just a foolish waste of military resources. Not to mention the lost work force. And just to make a statement...”

“No,” John blinked and saw the world in full colour again. He moved slowly to look at her. “They must have had a reason. If they’re not telling, it’s probably too important.”

“Or embarrassing,” Rose smiled beside him.

John nodded, smiling a bit himself. “Yeah, probably that too.”

\---

The dimly lit sewer was long and black and smelt like rotten computers, but the floor was relatively clear, so they didn’t have trouble walking. There was a faint hiss above them, but it was mostly from the safety-projectiles planted under each building. Punishments for inadequate behaviour or just convenient redecoration methods.

“Any preferences for the mission?” Karkat asked once the way they took on the labyrinthine tunnels showed the obvious destination.

Dave shrugged and kicked a malformed sewer-dwelling rodent off his foot. “Dunno. Gotta see what’s in for us and what we’ve got to do.”

“Please, I really need to get out of this shithole,” Karkat growled, his disgust directed at the city above. “The farther they send us, the better.”

“You up for a hike?”

“Except that. The conditions are awful in the mountains now and they have all these fucking patrols that want nothing more than to break your neck and put it back in place. How the fuck are they all so insane lately?”

“Maybe that’s why they closed the ectolabs. They can’t get the brain right anymore.”

Karkat huffed. “That’s what they get when they overuse the machinery. They should get back to the natural process for a few decades.”

Catching a moment of peace, Strider started putting his gloves on. “Oh, but they do. I’ve seen a farm a few months ago. These chicks were giving birth like crazy. A little too young, though. I’d say 14 is a lot of wasted potential, but who am I to disagree with the government?” He slid open a black door. “Sup.”

“Daaave!” Pyrope turned towards them, one hand on a rotating chair and one spread open in the air, all creepy eyes and sharp teeth and grinning. Vantas’s groan beside him was barely audible over her voice, but it was there. “You’re a fucking shit, where have you been?”

“Out and about, enjoying the fields of disgusting flowers and insects.”

She didn’t seem to care. “I was just going, but you must stay and see this,” she flapped her hand around Captor’s computers, earning a more audible groan from that one. “It’s the best shit I’ve seen in ages.”

“Cool.” If a blind chick said that that shit looked awesome, it must have been gold and diamonds. Who was he to argue?

“I’ll see you later,” she grinned a disturbingly large grin at him as she passed, then got her hands out of her agent jacket and pinched Vantas’s cheeks with impressive dexterity. “You too, krabsticks.”

“If you’d just give me a day and a fucking hammer, I’ll make sure you’ll talk through your nook for the rest of your miserable life, you worthless shitstaining parcelpile!”

“Excuse me, I’m right fucking here,” Captor announced from his computer chair.

Both Strider and Pyrope grinned. “That’s cute.” She went out of the room.

After these things evened out, Dave claimed an old desk as his ass-holder for the day and sat on it while Captor smacked the computer professionally to get the projector working. Halfway through the process, Vantas made a mean paper ball and threw it at the self-proclaimed technician, thus making him give a particularly powerful slap to the computer. It made it work. Sollux seethed and Dave saw, with a trained eye, something flicker in Karkat’s eyes. He smirked; it was always fun to see Karkat trying to hang on to this hopeless black crush of his. On his defence, Sollux did sometimes give off wrong signals, the sadistic fuck.

“What are we looking at?” Dave asked before the others got a chance to embarrass themselves further.

Captor fell back in his chair. “My computer screen. Or, rather, everyone’s screen since last night.”

“Everyone’s?” he raised an eyebrow and the other shrugged from a bony shoulder.

“In our network. Looks like nothing got transmitted to the ones above.”

Only now did Dave look at the projection. It was in binary code, resembling the one on Sollux’s main computer, but not those of his other ones. Karkat went ahead of him by getting closer to frown at all of them. Then he took out his mobile device and looked inquiringly at it.

“Don’t even ask. I spend three years making those. No human or machine can hack them,” Captor said proudly once he saw him looking.

Dave bent even lower, scrutinising the screens from his spot. “Is that...” Nobody finished his sentence, so he did it for himself. “They’re distress signals.”

“In every cybernetic language we know. It’s fucking impressive, not to mention that it drove Serket mad,” the hacker snickered.

“But why?” Dave got off his desk and the other two stared at him with the same look on their faces.

“Pompeii was destroyed,” Karkat deadpanned.

“And...?

“Is that not enough for you? You sick fuck!”

“No, no,” Captor chirped in, almost bouncing on his chair with glee. Creep. “It gets even better. They all came from the same place – Pompeii, yes – but more than that, from the same source.” Damn, his lisp was even worse when he was excited.

“The same computer?” Strider felt compelled to contribute.

“Are you saying somebody hacked the entire underground network while a city was falling around them?” Karkat oozed suspicion.

“Talk about hobbies, man...”

Still a bundle of joy and cracking, psionic nerves, Captor flailed at them to stop. “Shut the fuck up, I’m not done. It came from a government unit,” he grinned.

“You’re so full of shit.”

“Look at the source, douchebag, it’s clear as day. Besides...”

No Strider-esque patience by this point. “What?” Uncool.

Sollux grinned like the mad psycho he was and raised a bony finger. “I know why they did it.”

Karkat groaned and rolled his eyes. “Send the signal? They were fucking dying, you clobbering bulgestink, whoever they were.”

“No, idiot,” the other nudged him hard in the ribs. “Why they bombed it.” He raised another finger. “And I know who sent the signal.” With this, the genius, professional hacker, the best one alive, fucking _snickered_.

“Oh, enlighten us, we poor mortal fools,” Karkat rolled his eyes again.

“Damn straight,” Captor grinned. “Turns out Timaeus had stolen an artificial intelligence unit from right under the big guys’ noses this week. They fired as soon as they found his location.”

There was a moment of silence. “He stole one? Stole?! He was working in a secret base, how the fuck did he steal an entire unit and get away with it for days?!” Vantas threw his hands in the air for a moment and Strider smirked.

“Dude, you give them too much credit.”

Captor nodded. “Word. They were stupid enough to hire him in the first place. Fucking Timaeus, working for the government? I say, served them right.”

As he went back to unhacking his computers from the alerts, the other two kept quiet. Karkat had this look on his face that made him look older than he was, which usually meant he was thinking greatly. He started pacing around the room, the sound of his boots hitting the concrete floor eerie along with the keyboard typing. 

Dave observed this and knew that in this situation it was for the best that he let him process the information. He’d said before that Karkat was either exceptional or notorious at what he did. Planning happened to be one of the things he succeeded at. In the first few months of knowing him, Dave had found this aspect really irritating for his pride, but the feeling had eventual resigned and respect took its place. 

He sighed, when he got bored and looked at Sollux. “So...you think he’s dead?”

“They did their best to make sure of it,” the other said, still typing things only he and his disturbing eyes could see.

It took another moment. Unexpectedly, Karkat hit a desk with more force than was necessary to get their attention in an empty underground room. “Let’s go and find out.”

Dave raised an eyebrow and crossed his hands over his chest. “Why bother? We’ll find out by watching their computers anyway.”

Another few seconds had to pass for him to understand that saying anything had been futile. Karkat was looking sharply at him, his hands on the table and his stance authoritative. The silent pause made even Captor turn and look at the both of them.

“No,” Karkat said slowly and Dave took an intake of breath. This was so stupid; he was almost one head taller than the troll and yet this shit managed to fucking make him obey orders. “We’re going.”

Fuck. Even Captor looked impressed. Dave let out an unhappy breath and broke eye contact. “Whatever you say, boss.” It wasn’t funny when it was real.

\---

In accordance with his premonitions, Jade had not been impressed when Jake had bumped into her just as he was carrying a stranger’s half-dead body towards the medical room. She had only shown this by giving him a hard look before taking over the rescue mission. The nameless guy had woken up just as she started stitching his wound, which turned out to be a narrow cut obtained by activating a hidden lusus trap. All lusii had to be slowed down in order to let other animals live among them too. Otherwise, they were pretty enthusiastic hunters, which was not good at this time in history.

Jade had tried to extract other information from him too, but only found out the location of his three knives and gun. She had not been impressed by that either, so Jake had felt obliged to step in and make her see that it was still better than nothing. Standing up for strangers he found in the woods, now those were real survival skills.

Then she sent him to ask Tavros for more bandages and, upon returning, the wounded guy was giving him an amber-eyed look of pure post-Jade terror. Which quickly subsided into an impassive poker face. They let him sleep in the next room, which also happened to be the only one with a lock, and afterwards Jade went off on her night duty, leaving Jake the job of looking through the stranger’s belongings.

This he could do remorselessly, since it was about safety. He checked every pocket in his clothes (seeing as they had him temporarily naked under the blankets on the bed) and found nothing more than copper nails and dust and other small metallic pieces of work. Then, he finally opened the bag the guy was so keen on keeping with him.

Jake did all this while staying in the same room with the sleeping form of its owner and he half-expected him to wake up the instant he unzipped the bag. He didn’t. Obviously. Pain meds. Losing no more time, Jake looked inside and frowned. It was a rectangular prism made of dark metal, just a little big bigger than his head. Without taking it out, he shifted it from one side to the other and concluded that it was not working. That was it. Jade would have to interrogate the guy about it later. Possibly in the morning. He missed seeing a red blob light up on one side of the metal box as he closed the bag right up.


	2. Lopah

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Somebody is getting into trouble, somebody has no cultural sensitivity and somebody finds out stuff.

Everytime he woke up, John had to pause for a minute before rising up. As soon as his eyes were open, he became aware of a force pressing on his body, dull and painless and heavier than life and he couldn’t move an inch. Couldn’t blink, couldn’t breathe. Then it went away, like always, and he proceeded with his daily activities, trying to forget. Everytime it happened, he was terrified of the thought that one day it wouldn’t let go. That one day the world would spin forever and he would be its Atlas.

It was just as well that John didn’t know who Atlas was. The accuracy would have scared him even more and fear makes people weak as well as strong. This morning, he breathed heavily on the side of the bed and looked at the small room he was staying in. It smelt of rotten wood and mould and it was full of boxes. In the boxes were rags and other useless bits of fabric Jane and Kanaya had gathered from the people over the years. Jane said they were using them as bandages or warm covers during the winter. John didn’t care.

The unlicensed doctor and the nurse had rented him and Rose two of the storage rooms above the clinic. Jane had said it was the humane thing to do for refugees, especially since they seemed to be the only survivors. However, John had seen how she’d looked at his jacket.

Still, they had been there for almost a week and he’d helped the two of them as much as he could, even if there was not much to do when the resources were so sparse. John needed to find a job; anything.

Back in Pompeii, he’d helped Equius with his robots for a while. Then Equius was killed overnight and John found himself selling unfinished robot parts. After that, for some time, he’d been going around the town helping where he could, however much he could. Sometimes they paid him too. Sometimes they bought him lunch and he took half of it back to Rose. Then the city was destroyed and that was it.

When he got out of the room, Rose got a hold of his arm. She looked even more shrunken in the old hospital shirt and pants they’d given her. “Are we staying here long?” her violet eyes looked at him and there was a grey tint to her face that hadn’t been there the day before. Shit.

“I have no other options at the moment,” he replied and, contrary to his expectations, she looked relieved.

“I like it here,” she said and looked at the wooden, musty hallway as if it was the cosiest place she’d ever seen. It wasn’t far from the truth. “I think I can help.”

John raised an eyebrow and walked with her towards the stairway. “Help?”

“I found some books. I think I can use them,” Rose smiled and it made his chest and throat hurt. Back in the day, she’d been all about books. They were a rarity, truthfully.

“That’s good,” he choked on his words and let her go in front of him. “Did you tell them?” Maybe that would make their stay a permanent one. However, he wasn’t sure how others would react to Rose’s eclectic working methods.

They got downstairs and turned towards the non-patients area of the ground floor, where water was boiling in a strangely-shaped pot. It was probably troll culture. “I mentioned some of it to Kanaya. She seemed positively indifferent about it,” she grinned and he had to do so too. Whatever made her happy, really.

“Then I see no reason not to stay, unless something intervenes,” he tried to laugh, but it was such a weird sound in his mouth that he quickly gave it up.

Rose looked at him like she was going to commit mass murder if he wouldn’t get rid of his pessimistic manner soon enough. Pessimistic, him? No, he was a ray of sunshine. But he was sure something black twitched behind her eyes.

\---

Going undercover was always faster and easier than following the marked roads so, even though, officially, Dave Strider’s file was clean, he usually chose that method. Back when he’d been paired with John Egbert, they had tried acting all civil and the like during an expedition south and it had taken them double the time. Now, however, slipping through unmapped roads was also kind of a necessity, since Karkat had been more active before falling in the sewers. After all, he was the one who should have led the last troll rebellion. A good thing he didn’t, seeing that all the rebels have been killed.

Dave had an unfounded suspicion that his partner didn’t feel the same way about that. 

“You know, we should have got a car,” he said when they entered the fifth hour of trekking towards the closest city. Which was...probably Lopah, now that he thought about it. 70% troll population.

Karkat continued to lead the way. “Later. They must have had the area of at least a hundred miles around the bombing closed anyway. It’s better to get used to walking.”

“Said the one not carrying the ammo.”

“I told you to split it between us if it’s too heavy.”

Strider snorted. “With that condescending tone? Give me a break, my muscles had had worse days.” Maybe. Probably. Up until now, they hadn’t had to work that far from their station. The fun always took place in the south-west, near the capital.

The hills were covered with dried grass and parched apple trees. He hadn’t seen an apple in years, not since they went to a black market in the farther south. Trees like these ones were spread all around the country, mocking people with their possible food and asking them for water that they could suck up in their roots. People would look at them helplessly and move on. There wouldn’t be any real water for a long time. The ectolabs had filthed the sky for way too long.

As soon as they got to the top, the black, sharp shadows of Lopah could be seen, with their red windows and charcoal streets. “Nice place.”

“It’s depressive as shit,” Vantas said and went on downhill. If anything, he didn’t look thrilled to go back to his home town, not that Strider blamed him. The thing looked like a badly lit, shiny prison quarters.

Although there were orange fires somewhere in the centre of it. “What’s that there?” he pointed at them and the troll glanced from his hand to the city and frowned.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you guys have new moon festivals or something?”

“Excuse me?”

“Beltagne fires then? No? Nobody getting laid beside a campfire? Damn, another fantasy destroyed. Thanks a lot, Vantas.” He adjusted his backpack, hiding his smirk at the outraged looks the other was throwing at him.

As soon as they got inside Lopah and into the southern market it seemed that all the missing population of the last hundred miles had gathered in there. Which may have been just about right. From every side, people were bustling with goods and rubbish for sale. One couldn’t tell the streets were so busy from the outside; the buildings and walls were taller than they looked.

Still, this was just the market, acting like it did in any other city. Vantas would have had some old-school reference to make about it, but he was already marching ahead; when they would get out of these streets, they would see the empty, sombre, larger part of the dark city. Anyone who wasn’t selling or buying was safely locked inside, catching their breath or sleeping or working or dying.

“Say, what’s with all the red?” Strider asked, glancing, when he had the chance, at the small and numerous windows plastered on almost every building, as tall and dark as the sky. He wasn’t brilliant on intercultural matters, but he knew that it wasn’t such a popular colour, even less one to be exhibited so freely.

“It’s an act of defiance. Or was, when they used to care,” the other replied while successfully avoiding all the merchants in his way.

“Defiance against what?” he raked his brains for important events that might have caused it, but the past 50 years had had so many massacres he couldn’t be bothered to choose one and revolutionaries were usually more subtle. 

A pack of young trolls tried to sell him canned food while at the same time robbing him and they failed to do either. They did, however, make him lag behind. “Against the law they passed after the Winter War, that all those hurt in battle may be culled to preserve resources,” Vantas’s voice trailed all the way to him, despite being mixed with the general chatter.

“Oh,” Strider kicked one last kid off his leg. “That one. That was pretty damn bold, even if it didn’t do much good.”

“Tell me about it,” Karkat stopped to trade vitamin bottles for their dinner. “I was still in recovery at the time.” Who knew; taking electronic parasites out of one’s body was actually producing a lot of damage to one’s muscle tissues.

The royal military had done right about anything to him to make sure he did not lead the pre-war rebellion. Unlucky Vantas for being caught. Or sold. Whatever it had been. Thinking back on the news he’d received when he was still on hacking job with Egbert, Strider had to feel a little bit smug on his partner’s behalf. Hard measures like the ones applied to Vantas meant there was quite a lot of danger lurking around the higher ups as long as he was alive.

\---

Jake hadn’t had his glasses fixed in over five years, but they were still working formidably. At the moment, they were helping him inspect (creep around) their guest. Jade had, over the past couple of days, periodically used the term prisoner, but he thought that that was a teeny bit over the top.

In the four years he had spent with Jade and Tavros (and helpers, from time to time) in this place, Jake had never encountered a wanderer. For lack of a better term, he’d set for that one. In consequence, now he was fascinated by the sheer amount of information potential this guy held within himself. News did reach the dry forest they were residing in, but they were more often than not more distorted than a mangrove river at its best.

Meanwhile, this, this person right here represented an unconditioned connection with the outside world, with the places Jake couldn’t reach anymore. Blasted lost leg. Blasted enemy patrols. He wasn’t even able to fly a plane now, like Tavros. Well, Tavros, having fought (airborne) in the war, had had access to one of its best mechanics. Of course his legs would work. By comparison, Jake’s right calf and foot looked like a child’s play. Not that he blamed Jade for it; she’d done all she could do, but the resources were scarce. Nevertheless, said mechanic was dead now so, yeah, good luck getting a better leg now.

If he stopped to think about not ever getting out of here, Jake would lose his breath.

He was drowning in sedentariness and it was killing him slower and surer than any virus.

Wait a minute there. There was no excuse; Jake felt disgruntled as soon as he realised he was sulking. He couldn’t have this. He was on guard (creeping) duty. Pushing some of the covers aside from the stranger’s sleeping, periodically drug-filled body, he analysed his stomach wound again. It healed quite nicely; he had to be somewhat impressed with this person’s immune system.

One last dab of herbal mush before he went on his morning patrol, then. The skin around the gash was unthreateningly hot to the touch. In their vocabulary, that was good. Something beeped and Jake stopped with his right hand hovering over the other’s skin. When a second sound failed to arrive, he discarded the thought and changed the bandages, all the while having the feelings of (1) being watched and waited after and (2) the other not being as asleep as he declared.

When a knock came at the door, he wasn’t ashamed to say his breath relaxed. “Come in,” he responded by means of mollifying the stranger-danger atmosphere that hung around the cabins.

“Any problems?” Tavros slid soundlessly into the room (again, high-tech prosthetics) and looked from Jake to the stranger and back again. He had faint patches of dirt all over himself, since going by night around the forest meant you had to fight with the land drenched by the fog. There were also green stains on his horns from where he had probably encountered an overexcited bush.

“Not at all. Miss Harley had him dozed up just before she went to sleep.” Jake finally got up from his low chair by the bed, winced a little at the numbness in his leg-and-a-half and looked up again. “Sorry for keeping you here in your free time,” he smiled apologetically at Tavros, who shrugged it off easily.

“It’s not like we have much else to do,” he switched sides with Jake, who was putting on his cargo vest. “At least this may end up being, err, exciting,” he grinned with too many teeth and Jake smiled back.

“If he gives you any trouble...,” he opened the door and looked back at Tavros’s happy face. Uh. “...um, don’t be too hard on him.” He’d seen Tavros taming lusii four times his size barehanded; he wasn’t taking any risks.

\---

When working, Jane usually got this blank look on her face, like she didn’t know what to say and she knew she didn’t know and, as John watched her that day, while slowly sipping from mug of herbal coffee Kanaya had forced into his hands, he thought it was strangely familiar.

“Stay off the energy drinks for a few days, alright?” she waved the last patient off the door and turned to face John. He thought her eyes bore too much into him. “Feeling better?”

He put the mug down and caught her gaze in his. “I should be able to work already.”

The look he got in return was one of sad amusement. “I only inquired about your health, John. I’m not trying to throw you in the streets.” Were he younger, he would wince. “What job are you looking for?” she trailed when he didn’t waver.

That was her asking what he’d been doing until then. He didn’t have the jacket on this time, but he knew that it had something to do with it. “Anything, really. I’m a fast learner,” he took another gulp of drink as she poured herself a cup too.

“There are people that need help in this city. I’m just afraid they will be hard to persuade into being helped.” 

Which was just as well. John had no place in the helping-people business. He’d chosen to help Rose when she got sick and the entire underground considered him a deserter and had them both on the run. Then, as if that hadn’t been enough, he chose to help him and look what good it did him. Nothing lost, nothing gained except for a few hundred people’s deaths on his conscience. He so wished he didn’t have one anymore. At least Pompeii hadn’t been his fault.

“I’ll see what I can do.” He nodded once and caught himself. “Thank you.” It was quiet now. “Have you seen Rose?”

Jane paused with her mug halfway to her mouth and pondered. “She offered to help Kanaya look through our old archives here. There’s not much left, since they’ve used most of everything for fuel seven years ago, but you never know what luck might bring you.”

John frowned. He didn’t believe in luck and the thought of Rose alone in the city with patrols all around after what just happened to her didn’t cheer him up either. But she’d been an agent too, in her own time. She had aced the training, even though she didn’t have as much experience on the field but... Yeah, maybe it was going to be alright. Maybe.

“Yeah, uh, thanks. I’ll go looking for work tomorrow. Thanks,” he left her his half-finished mug and absconded upstairs, ready to set his PDA on fire by hacking into every network available. His last computer has been left in Pompeii, but he knew that at least this he could procure quite easily. Electronics were everywhere nowadays; most were broken and ready to fry your brains out, but John had figured them all during his years on the run and while, well, helping.

\---

They spent over an hour walking down the black streets of Lopah, careful to give a nasty enough eye to everyone that looked at them for too long. Nothing was ever fully deserted. One moment, Strider got the strangest feeling in his gut and it took him a moment to find its source. He looked to the right; several children were banging various pieces of metal and glass besides a sharp-edged building, laughing all the way, too loud in the emptiness around. From time to time, their sounds became a little more than noises.

Dave hadn’t heard music in months, maybe almost a year. Not since he and Karkat had last went into the archives. Even then, they had seemed very empty without Rose there. Dave bit the inside of his cheek at the thought. She was dead and he did not care anymore. (Didn’t care at all. Fuck her, why did she have to take John down with her too?)

The archives were huge, packet, vaguely filthy storerooms in the underground network. Newbies worked there more often than not, but he and Karkat found a lot of lame joy in going there from time to time. Down there, in the hundreds of rooms splattered around the country, were stored millions of mementos of the past. Books, movies, music, broken electronic devices. 

The last time, while Vantas was flash-reading book after book, Dave had found a surviving piece of engineering, a tiny black monolith, and plugged it in a few dozen times until it started charging. Its sound system was pretty damaged, but it had let him play a few songs before finally collapsing. Such old songs; one even from the nineteen hundreds.

Back in Captor’s layout, the archive was a clusterfuck nowadays. Before, Rose was assuming the post of make-believe librarian with an iron fist. Newbies got their practical training by moving metal shelves and washing machines around. Better than when he had first joined. He was 13 and by 14 he had as many bullet scars as his years. Afterwards had come the swords, but those weren’t that popular anymore. However, he must have had a skilled ecto-parent somewhere in his lineage; his ecto-siblings seemed to have better reflexes in that domain too. Rose had double-sworded him once really good and as for his brother, well, his brother was a shit that almost cut him arm off one time.

“Whenever you’d like to return to the morbid reality,” Karkat tapped his foot, having stopped in front of him and Dave blinked himself back to the real world. Ugh, awkward. “Thank you,” the other rolled his eyes and sidestepped into a building. The door and walls felt like there were made of black granite.

“How the hell can you tell one from the other?” he asked after missing the opportune moment to make the conversation casual. The inside smelt like ice-cold dust.

“Please, kindly keep your racist personality to yourself.”

Dave winced; two polite words in one sentence. “Just asking.” His eyes found the spots of orange and yellow hidden in his partner’s dark hair and he just had to. “Using your horny senses again?”

The swearing-tirade took place only under Karkat’s breath, much to Dave’s dismay.

\---

Tavros was waiting in front of the door five hours later, when he returned and Jake immediately rushed to the cooler to get something for him to drink. “No problems, I trust?”

“Oh, well,” Tavros smiled as he opened his can of so-called ‘grape juice’. “We’ve been talking for the past couple of hours, so I think he’s doing better.”

Jake raised an eyebrow as he processed the words. Had Jade been using her drugs again? “Talking?” A nod. “Ah, gosh, has Jade arrived yet?” he looked around, all the same. He didn't like talking to people after they’d received the special medicine from Jade. Her pills usually gave people a vague (although not creepy) sense of trust and she used them in interrogations because of their amnesic side-effects. Jake disliked the idea of them, but he guessed they were better than torture. What was there to interrogate anyway?

“She’s at the market today,” Tavros reminded him and, of course, Jade would be gone for many hours still. The closest cities to them were Golgotha and Nyx and they both were hundreds of miles away. “So, uh, do you want to talk to him?”

Jake blinked. “Er...”

“His name’s Dirk. Says he used to work as an engineer of sorts in the west but, ah, I think that was mostly polite lying.” He lost a yawn just as he was raising the drink to his mouth. Jake never understood how he kept his teeth so sharp during times like these. “You try it too. I will go now if, uh, you don’t need me anymore...”

“No! Not at all. Thank you a bunch. Next barbecue’s on me!” That would surely cause a gap in his economies. Meat was more expensive than rocket fuel these days.

Right. Immune system or not, the person on the bed still looked positively shaken, kind of hollow, probably thanks to the pills’ side-effects. Well, he seemed stable enough to Jake; he had to be, since those eyes were pressing hard into his skull. Uh.

“Er...” Okay; a grip? He had to get one. “Hi,” Jake grinned, keeping the awkward feeling on the inside, and closed the door.

“Sup,” the other answered, amber eyes wavering with badly-concealed uncertainty.

“Feeling less corpsey yet?” He vaguely wondered where the burial mound around those parts was; they hadn’t had any corpses ever since Jake joined them. “I should probably get you some food, if you’d just stay here...”

He only made a step when he was stopped. “If by food you mean the gooey yellow thing, then, please, no more.” This guy really needed to work on his intonation. The blank tone did make Jake smile, all the same. Shit, wait, what if he was broken?

“Aha.” Tavros must have taken care of that; of course he did. “Right then,” Jake pulled the creeping-chair with an easy motion and flopped down into it with as much grace as the different weights in his legs let him.

And all throughout that, orange eyes followed him like he was expected at any moment to pull a scalpel out of his vest and start experimenting. The colour was unnaturally bright, so Jake ran to the conclusion that this person was also an ecto-product. Which was good; it was familiar ground for him.

“A change of clothes would be nice.”

He didn’t remember that silence being so loud; so unprofessional. “Come again?”

“Clothes?” The other pulled down on the sheet covering his half-bandaged torso. Oh, right.

“Indeed. That is quite a guidebook-example of nakedness you have going on there, chap,” Jake pulled himself up and went to the storage drawer beside the door. “We’re gonna take care of that really soon.” 

They had a number of extra changes of clothes stored around the cabins, most of them taken by his two colleagues from dead soldiers’ quarters after the war. Colourless, flaxy things, but enough to clothe a person in need. Now, if he could only find a pair of trousers too.

“Heard you’re an engineer, Dirk,” he said with maybe too much cheer as he moved on to the cupboard. It wasn’t the most polite thing to do, being so open about having got facts that hadn’t been addressed to him, but it was better like this than to have him thinking they weren’t communicating here. It wasn’t like he’d remember.

“You can say that.”

The mission being accomplished, Jake threw all the clothes on the bed and resumed his place. “Here you go. I’m Jake, by the way.”

Dirk shook hands with the sureness of a well-disciplined soldier and Jake didn’t know what to make of this obvious display of information. Was it a threat, a peace treaty, a display of trust or a thank you? Four years spent with Jade made him rethink every action a sentient being could make.

They didn’t talk while Dirk got dressed, seemingly perfectly conscious of all his wounds, some of which Jake hadn’t even been aware of (the state of his ankles, for example, was upsetting). In a mental list he had learnt over time not to forget, Jake took notes; so Dirk had medical training too, at least at a basic level. He also had a vague imprint on his right shoulder, which turned out to be made of numbers. That looked familiar.

Something in Jake’s mind clicked on its own accord and his eyes widened, but he quickly shut it all inside. Another bullet point. “Better?” he asked once the dressing-up was over.  
Dirk blinked at himself. “I know somebody who’d say I look like an overgrown Oliver Twist actor.” There was a wry smile on his lips as he said it. Bullet point.

“I’ll say,” but he stopped. Couldn’t let himself give out too much knowledge, on the possibility that it might not be forgotten; this was not an exchange. “I have no idea what that is, but it sounds like some snobbish pasta. You should mind your wound for a while more, it still has time to go berserk.”

He only got a shrug in return. “Nah, it should be okay. How far south am I?” Wary again, there you go.

Jake pondered; at the same time, this guy could be meaning no harm and maybe, by keeping him here longer than necessary, he would get into trouble. Everybody had problems nowadays, it had nothing to do with how good or evil you were. 

“A couple hours from Golgotha by jet. Which...we don’t have around here. It would barely take you six hours to get out of the forest if you ran all the way, though.” Jade’s preferred method, obviously. “You should have taken the hill’s road; there’s really nothing around here.” He ought to know; he’d tried everything.

A small glint of surprise, then of relief passed those orange eyes and Jake reluctantly made another mental note. “This is a neutral zone, right?”

“Eh,” awkward. “Y-eeah, most of the time. Can’t promise some patrols won’t show up from time to time.” Though you shouldn’t have any problem with that, Jake thought as he looked at bullet #3. 

“Bummer. Uh, and my equipment?”

Jake blinked straight at his face, noted the way blond hair stuck to his forehead and thought about fever medicine. “What equipment?”

The other as good as winced. Um. “Oh, you mean those things?” Jake pointed at the contents of his backpack and he relaxed. “Sorry, you can’t touch those yet, you’re in the possible-danger files.”

“I’m...” Dirk’s jaw remained slack and he shuffled on the bed. “I’m not -- oh, for God’s sake,” he ran a hand through his damp hair. “I have an ID, it’s in there,” he pointed at the metallic box neither Jake nor Jade or Tav had been able to turn on over the past couple of days.

 _Of course you have an ID_ , Jake thought sourly and walked over to the mysterious device.

“Press the screen on the side.” 

There was no screen on the side. Oh, there was. This could be a trap, a really bad one, but a trap nonetheless. Jake pressed the screen and a slick piece of white steel was pushed out. It wasn’t a fake. So much for his news from the outside; a governmental ID wasn’t his idea of news.

“And now you know,” Dirk said from behind him.

“Now I know,” Jake grimaced at the card.

“I might also point out they bombed a city for me.”

\---

John should have known that going too deep into the city was going to turn out as a bad idea. He’d looked around for some place to work for hours, but apparently nobody liked his face in this city. As he kept walking, he mused that he probably wouldn’t like his face either; it was just as good that he didn’t have a mirror.

He had, however, showered for an hour straight the night before and changed his clothes, reluctantly, at Rose’s insistence. Now he still had the bulletproof wifebeater underneath his shirt, but his late uniform was back at the clinic, being washed to death. Needless to say, it was an inconvenience.

Just as this other one was. Some people were never lost; they just didn’t know where everywhere else was, but John couldn’t know this. In consequence, he was lost and his PDA had been damaged in Pompeii’s fall. That’s what he liked to think; it wasn’t as if he’d made smoke rise out of it while trying to get over the first fifty pass-codes.

The buildings looming on all sides were not as high as the ones in Pompeii and not as clean, but what they didn’t have in height they made up in number. And shiny edges. When the sun got out for a few seconds from behind the thick clouds, the landscape looked like a necropolis of crystal pyramids. Dirty, orange and indigo crystal, but crystal all the same. He had yet to figure this one out, although he probably never would. He didn’t care enough.

Now, with the dark grey sky above, John felt like he was alone on a scale model city shut in a box. The air was stifling. People were bustling around as if the claustrophobic feeling was making them feel safe in hard times. It wasn’t easy to find people to envy in this day and age, but in that moment John truly wished he was living their lives.

The streets were narrow and paved with black glass as if people still cared about visual effects. Everything seemed to be leaking and there was a constant squeak of rubber on glass all around, but the people moulded too well with their surroundings for the place to feel crowded. John guessed that as a place to be, it must be a pretty decent one, if one didn’t mind the countless maniac drones skulking around.

As soon as he ducked into another street, he began to feel more and more uneasiness in the air around him. His danger instincts kicked in, but he kept walking until he reached a better-lit street. It wasn’t any better and, when he took another turn, he fell right into the rabbit hole.

“Well, this is a sight I hadn’t expected to see anytime soon,” an only-too-familiar voice drawled from his right and, since there was pretty much no way out of this one, John closed his eyes and took a deep breath before opening them back.

He turned to the other person slowly, keeping a trained blank face on. He could feel his knife in his belt and his gun beside his left hand, but he didn’t try to move. Above all this, foolish relief was fought over by dread in his mind and the worst part of his position was that he hadn’t taken any brain pills in a week. Easy bite for psychics. He’d always been so stupid and slow and unprepared.

“What, we’re not talking now?” the other raised an inquisitive eyebrow and smirked sourly at him. Something crawled around his chest and made it hurt so much he was breathless. “Oh, Johnny...”

He hadn’t seen Vriska in six years.

\---

Karkat’s old hive/bedroom-with-fungus was almost as small as the place Dave had lived in for the first thirteen years of his life, except it had windows (which, as an afterthought, weren’t painted red). As soon as they got inside, Karkat had started checking all his secret hideouts and niches while Dave inspected the rest of the place. Not that there was anything much to inspect, but you never knew.

Hints that someone had tried to make the place more cosy a long time ago still remained around, though. Textiles (now torn to pieces) had once been hung over the walls, pillowy shapes full of mould were piled in a corner and he even found a rough, handmade kettle under a table. He knew that before he was taken away to be trained and what-not Vantas had been living alone, like most of his species still did at a young age, but that didn’t mean it had been a joyous experience. Life sucked.

By the end of their treasure hunting, Karkat had gathered all his findings on something that could once be called a couch. It could have been yellow, too.

“Nice colour,” Dave smirked and, when he understood the insinuation, his partner tripped him. Ouch. There went the table and the kettle.

“Shut up, I didn’t even know him when I crawled into this place. And keep your vocal amoebas to yourself, I can facilitate my lugubrious state of being very well on my own.”

Uh, he hadn’t realised it had become that touchy a subject. Strider guessed there was so long one could hold unrequited feelings of any colour without getting any relief. It didn’t help that Karkat kept forcing himself to act as if everything was more important than that. If he didn’t know better, he would think that the guy feared reciprocity. He did know better, though, so he knew he did.

Right. Dave crossed out another subject from his piss-the-Karkat-off list. “Okay. Sorry, that wasn’t cool. What have you found?” he said with a pacifying tone, getting up from the pile of rubbish.

The other started listing as he threw the things from one place to the other. “A shitty tour-guide of the last capital, a couple dozen hollow bullets, an oyster knife, a bottle of chloroform, three pieces of gum and five teeth.”

“Cool.” Venomous teeth. Dave looked at the guide, opened it, felt his insides knot in a thousand sailor knots and closed it back up. “Not taking that one with us.”

Instinctively, they started changing from day to night gear, while at the same time catching a break to let their legs’ muscles unravel. “We should go and see what the hell is burning in the central square,” Karkat eventually said as he tied his boots again.

Dave was half-musing about taking a nap tomorrow. “Are you sure they are not Christmas lights? Bringing hope to the people.”

“What the fuck is Christmas.”

“Still figuring that one out. You’re the expert, though, you should be ashamed.”

“Oh, yeah, please excuse me while I go back to my top secret library and proceed to look into this crucial matter. Oh, wait.” Heh, at least ranting on the stairs made him bump his head on a wall.

“Going by foot again?” Dave asked once they were at street level again and he glanced at a couple of jets lying around. Fancy scooters; and fast as shit.

“Inside, yeah. We’ll get a vehicle as soon as we get out of town.”

“And here I was beginning to hope we’d walk all the way to Pompeii. I’m so disappointed right now.” 

There were briefly 1000 miles from their current location to Pompeii, so, with a decently working vehicle, they ought to get there in two or three days, counting the walking area and the occasional stops. 

He almost complained about the futile mission again, but stopped himself. If there was anyone whom he could trust to be clear-headed in this day and age, that was Karkat. Sooner or later, he’d get a reason out of him and he knew that it would be satisfactory.

They could see the light of whatever was going on at the end of the street and their steps at once became more calculated, but not enough to fill the air with the silence of someone making no sounds. There wasn’t anybody going to watch. Having in mind the life at the market, this was uncanny.

Then they reached the piazza and they saw that there were, indeed, fires. One big fire made of smaller ones, to be clear, burning high on the side of the circular open space. Half a dozen people clad in dark militia uniforms seemed to be attending them and there were no movements.

“That’s suspicious as shit. Educate me in your fascinating culture?” Dave inclined his head and whispered, but Karkat was frowning at the image before them too.

“I don’t think –” But his sentence was cut off by a low wail, made more powerful by the night’s silence. 

One of the grey-and-black figures proceeded to push a thin-skinned woman into the flames. From the way her body succumbed, there was a gap in the ground in the middle of each fire. Her screams were soundless. The skin of her limbs started blackening and one of the men appeared to throw an bucketful of flammable liquid over her. Kerosene, probably. There was something else dying with her. Dave’s red irises were devoured by black as he saw the dark shapes going out of the woman’s carcase, squirming until they died too.

\---

It was the first day in weeks that they had something more substantial than soupy humus for dinner. Jake had never loved Tavros’s pasta more. It wasn’t even slightly gooey and it kept disappearing off his plate, much to his consternation. Jade was eyeing the make-believe beer like she wanted nothing more than to take five of them and go back to her room, but the night was young and she had to analyse the guest. Said guest was, at the moment, still grounded, but seemed to understand his situation a little better now. Jake didn’t. He wondered if Jade was going to keep drugging him after this too.

“Alright...,” Jade muttered once the sounds at the dinner table ceased and turned towards them. “Jake! Report!” she used the commander tone this time, although she did so while grinning, so it wasn’t quite as intimidating.

“Yes, ma’am,” he mock-saluted and pushed his empty plate away. “Shall I, er, go right to the facts or do you want a full speech?” Tavros shared a sympathetic grin with him from across the table and passed him a drink.

Jade waved her hand distractedly and pulled a chair for herself. “Just tell me what you’ve found out so I know what I have to say in there.”

“Oh, well,” he took a mouthful of fizzy liquid. “Let’s see,” he prepared his hand for counting and started talking a little faster as not to forget. “He seems to have some sort of military training or maybe just martial arts, but definitely something along those lines, he had the governmental markings on his arm along with a complete ID but also knows people with access to the underground archives. He’s on the run and he said something about a city being bombed, but I’m not too sure what that was about...,” he saw Jade’s eyes widen, so he hurried to finish with a personal flourish. “He was more cooperative after he found out that we are neutral. I didn’t even need to push him much.” Maybe he wants help, he thought again, but that was something he doubted Jade would be open to give. “Do you think I should contact Roxy?”

Jade drummed her fingers on the table top, expression changing now and then. “No,” she eventually said. “Not yet. Good job. I’ll make light of this myself.” Up and away, she was already halfway out the door when Jake turned in his chair.

“Don’t shoot him!”

She grinned back at him, pretty, but fierce face looking positively excited for a change. “Why not?” Then she kept walking down the hallway, her muddy combat boots making hollow noises on the floor. The camouflage pants and white shirt she wore still managed somehow to give her an authoritative air, as if the space twisted ahead of her and settled into something more adequate. Like a military headquarters before the last battle.

“Look on the bright side,” Tavros said when she was out of their eyesight. “If she shoots him, he has really good chances of survival.”

Jake shook his head and laughed. “That gives me all the hope in the world,” he knocked their drinks. “So let’s hope we won’t have to bury anyone tomorrow.”

“Yeah...that would be a pain in the ass,” Tavros reflected.

He had a short night patrol scheduled today too, Jake remembered and sat up, putting his two additional layers of clothing back on. “By the way,” he turned before getting out of the kitchen and his colleague looked up at him. “Where do we even bury people around here?”

“Trees. It’s good fertilizer.”

Why did he even ask?  
 


	3. Distress Signals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the other page, somebody is surviving, somebody watches helplessly and somebody gets a hang on things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On Dave's performance,  
> and whatever I never could ever let you go.

Midday arrived with a minutely brighter light shining over the city. If anything, it made the clouds seem whiter. Rose was stacking moth-eaten blankets in a thin sack around that time, glancing up from time to time to time to see if Kanaya had found something new.

Despite talking to John about it, she hadn’t actually been of much help until the day before, when Kanaya suggested that she went with her here. Rose initially planned to use the alchemical knowledge she’d gathered from reading old, black tomes beneath the capital city in order to prepare medicine, but once she’s gathered a bowl and some cheap minerals, she realised that all the notions in her head were now irremediably scrambled.

It made her angry, because as long as it was only her body that was eaten away, she was fine with it, but she didn’t want anything slithering in her brain. The other night, it had made her so mad that she threw up again. For a second, she’d even remembered the trip towards the city and that worsened her state.

It wasn’t the pain or the abuse or the receding feeling of bile in her throat every time she saw a patrol around the city. It was the feeling of being used, of knowing that for a while she’d looked like less of a human being in the eyes of others and utter contempt almost blinded her vision because she knew she’d initially joined the underground exactly to be able to defend herself against such things.

Right now, her breaths became quicker. She had to calm down.

“How long have you been doing this?” she asked when they seemed about ready to go.

Kanaya looked like she hadn’t quite expected her to talk any more than she already did that morning. In turn, Rose guessed she didn’t really get to talk to many people except for Jane; everyone else was closed for the lifetime. “A year or so. I used to hide here before I got hired.”

Rose nodded. The archives they were sitting in now were emptier than any she’d seen so far. The walls and shelves were black and the floor was musty with decomposed paper, a sign that the air ventilation hadn’t been used in a while. It made a metaphorical piece of her heart ache because she knew how these were, in fact, supposed to look like. How they must have looked like in the beginning.

“I imagine they must’ve been closed for a long while. Do you not have an underground connection in this town anymore?” There was no reason not to be one. After all, it was close to Pompeii, which was a big, disconnected city. There ought to be something. Unfortunately, a lot could change in six years, the time she’s been out of the system.

A second sac was pulled shut with a flourish. “We do. They moved to the north-eastern part of the city, though. Under the residential area.” 

They started to make their way back. It was one of the first times Rose had ever seen stairs to the outside in an underground facility. It held to prove that it was abandoned. Back home, she had to go five stories down in order to reach the archives. She hadn’t seen a working tube since John took her out of the quarantine room and left the underground without any notice.

The stairs were steep and narrow while her hands were stiff with the piled fabric and her legs felt bad, as if all her sickness was driven into them at the moment. She was fairly sure that if she looked down at her calves she would see it moving under her skin through her three-layered pants. “What were you hiding from?” she asked Kanaya in an attempt to distract her own thoughts.

This wasn’t the hiding place she would’ve chosen, so she didn’t think the crime was too serious. If she did, she wouldn’t have asked. In this day and age, everybody ought to have a secret only for themselves; in case they might end up as everything they have left. Kanaya didn’t stop in her ascension. “I stole something for a friend. I was lucky they didn’t realise how important it was, otherwise I would have been caught before I reached the street’s corner.”

Friend. The word sounded so strange in her head after such a long time. She didn’t have many friends before either; John did, but the few they had in common had tried to cut her throat as soon as the illness made itself visible. She couldn’t help being bitter about the term now. “Did they pay you back?”

Kanaya was just climbing up the hole to the outside world. When she was out, she turned to help her too. “They did.” She sounded cold now. “They stayed alive.”

\---

It took Karkat only a few seconds to understand that they ought to get away from there as fast as they could. This wasn’t some sacrificial mound for unspecified sects conjuring their Messiahs; this was public service. They were burning the garbage and the garbage was people. Still, as they ducked into a darker street, farther away from the piazza, it seemed like they haven’t been spotted.

“I guess it’s the long way out for us now,” Strider sighed and Karkat turned to stare at him in amazement. His goggles (safer than aviators) had descended from the top of his head and now rested close to his forehead and he looked strained with calm. When their eyes met, an eyebrow was raised. “What?”

“Do you know what that was?” Karkat pointed at the wall beside him. The image would not leave his mind’s eye.

“Have you seen what got out of her at the end?” It was a blur, but of course he’d seen it. It was black and writhing and alive. It looked like something from his most common dreams. “I say, I think they’d decided that the best way to deal with the plague is the nice, old-fashioned way. Nothing can spread if it’s ash. Or whatever that shit turns into.”

Karkat was still gaping at him, feeling somewhat sick to his stomach. “Didn’t your sister have that?” He couldn’t know for sure; she’d gone missing along with Dave’s partner the year before he got out of rehabilitation. Still, news travel fast. 

Nevertheless, he hadn’t expected it to look quite as bad as it sounded, merely because people didn’t get sick like they used to nowadays. As if, in accordance to regency laws, the illnesses currently at hand were slow, subtle and lethal, letting people live most of their natural lives while slowly eating at their insides. The maladies were almost passive; this looked aggressive and angry.

He bit his lip in an attempt to be civil and looked at his partner. The look he got in return showed that Dave wished he hadn’t opened his mouth. Well, that was a day-by-day feeling for everyone he met and he ought to get used to it.

“She did. And she presumably died in worse circumstances than these dudes, so I don’t see what the problem in sight is.” When he was done, Karkat looked down as not to show him that he’d heard his voice almost breaking. Some people were better off thinking they had no feelings.

His sister was one of the few subjects Dave had been totally closed about. At first, Karkat had been surprised to hear him mention a strong connection based just on ectobiology, but then his cultural knowledge kicked in and he guessed humans still had somewhat of a genetic memory of natural siblings. In lack of anything else, they adapted and called their hybrid clones by the old terminology.

He had been born on Earth and lived on it his entire pitiful life, but he knew there were still some high-bloods who’d been alive during the invasion and even before. It was natural when one’s lifespan could reach the thousands. He wondered if those still remembered where they had come from. He sure didn’t feel any ecto-vibe calling him to pink and blue fields.

The further away from the fires they got, the darker it was. Lopah didn’t believe in street illumination or, rather, it believed in natural darkness. These days, the only lamps that worked were thrown around the markets. Just another privilege earned after the rebellion. Half a night later, they reached the eastern side of the city and some taller blocks could be seen reflecting orange light yet again. Just like the way they got in, this was their way out. If lucky, the market extended outside the city walls too, so getting a vehicle would be less promiscuous.

For now, the streets rolled around them like dead beetles and the stones underneath their feet were as black as the rest of the city. If he strained his think pan a little, Karkat could recall the days he’d spent running along these same streets in his childhood. He remembered looking up at the black, jagged monoliths and thinking they were enormous; many years later, the feeling was the same.

Still, from an objective point of view, he shared the thought of many: not much progress has been made in the past few centuries. In fact, it was visible to the most moronic mind that the Invasion had regressed human technology with a few centuries and redirected both it and the troll one towards military electronics.

Nowadays, they had bombs that could take effect on people they targeted by eye colour while doing jack shit to the ones standing right beside them, but they still had to burn their ill. Still had to dispose of those with handicaps instead of curing them. Karkat was familiar enough with that; if someone hadn’t stolen his contact data before the post-war law had been put in action, he might have woken up with his intestines on the other side of the room too. It had been dangerous and stupid, but he didn’t know Captor personally at the time in order to ask him to run an erasing spell on his identity. Instead, he had to ask help from the last person he wanted to endanger; he had set a new high score of atrocious moirallegience.

\---

When Dirk opened his eyes, he wasn’t in the same room he’s been brought in last. That one looked like a more sterile one, so if he had to guess, he’d been moved from the medical area to the “residential” one. He couldn’t remember anything much from after the long-haired female clad in military uniform had pushed a needle into his arm. 

Shit. Those words together never meant well. How long had he been here?

There was a throbbing in his head that got worse and worse as he kept trying to gather his thoughts. _Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit SHIT._ He dropped his head in his hands and exhaled, trembling all over. He took a breath that was too short and exhaled too much. He tried again, pressing his fingers into his scalp to stop them from shaking.

Segments of memory flashed before his eyes but disappeared before he could grasp them and he squeezed his eyes shut. _Shit shit shit shit. Fuck..._ He tried breathing again and it worked better, even if his throat was tight and his lungs hurt. Exhale. Inhale. He no longer felt the need to hold his head still, so he dropped his hands.  
And looked around.

He was alone. Well, as alone as he could possibly be. With a soundless movement, Dirk threw the covers from on top of him and rapidly scanned his body. All intact. There were bandages around his stomach and his feet and he was dressed in colourless cotton. He had been using poor combat boots when Pompeii was bombed, so they’d had a most inconvenient impact on his ankles.

The room, naturally, didn’t have windows or too much furniture. Still, Dirk memorised it in case a fight-and-flight opportunity might arise. The best weapon he had in sight was a water bottle. He let his eyebrows rise at that. He hadn’t encountered a water-selling location in his flight here. In the worst case scenario, he’d been too preoccupied to pay attention.

He remembered the week-long run, skipping from train to train and then finally choosing to go by foot in the shelter of the giant trees of the forest. He’d been heading for Nix, at first, hoping to find Roxy so he could catch his breath. 

He wondered if he was close.

His bag was placed on the table, surprisingly enough. Did they think it was a bomb? Or worse. He must have told her something. The thought made bile rise in his throat. To let himself be drugged that easily. How much blood had he lost, anyway? Another foolish wound, that one. He could escape a bombing, but not a simple bear trap.

With slow, but deliberate movements, Dirk pushed himself up from the bed and rested his feet on the floor. It was only a step and a half to the table, but he limped all the same. Somehow, the air in the room felt different now that he was on his feet. It smelt grassy and dry and the slightest bit sharp. Probably pine needles.

The metallic unit felt heavier in his hands than he remembered, which was another bad sign, so he guessed he was weaker than he’d thought. Hoped. Of course he knew he was weak as shit; that’s why he’d fucked up. Leave the running boy out in the wild and he’ll start whimpering for help faster than you say ‘doomed’. He didn’t know if it was the pain, the medicine or the thought that made him want to throw up.

He uncovered the hidden keyboard in the machine’s side and tapped a few sharp 5-digit codes. Soon enough, its camouflaged screen glowed a circular red before fading to a blue and black pattern of lines. Dirk carried it back to the bed and sat down with the unit on his lap, watching it blankly. 

“Do you have connection right here?” No sounds came right away, but then the lines wobbled and the screen turned black again. “Seriously, now. Don’t think that just because I’m a fugitive with a lifespan of a hill rodent I don’t possess a screwdriver anymore.”

The screen did the most accurate depiction of electronic reluctance while lighting up again. “I have connection,” it said. 

That meant there was an underground bunker somewhere in the radius of 70 miles. It could be anywhere, but at least now he had a chance of getting to one (with or without escaping manoeuvres from this forest troop) as well as finding out what he’d missed while being on the run.

The first thing he saw, however, was an Outbox full of distress signals. It was a fact; he was going to be in a perpetual state of nausea from now on. There were thousands of them, all high on the emergency ladder and served with a lock-down protocol on the side. Dirk’s eyes almost burned with horror at the discovery.

“What the fuck did you do?”

The screen looped through pale blue lines of text impassively. “I’m a high-technology AI unit, you can’t throw me in a battlefield and expect me to stay silent.”

Dirk took a deep breath, while making a mental note to check his lungs’ state as soon as he had the opportunity. “A few bombs blew up so you decided to hack the entire underground network?” his voice was as strained as it’d been when he’d first been recruited.

“The chances of survival were 47% after the first raid, 30% after the second and 17% when it combusted in front of you.”

He rubbed the bridge of his nose while keeping his eyes shut tight. “Whose chances of survival?”

“Yours, of course. Congratulations on keeping your ass alive.” Silence followed.

For the most part of his life, he hadn’t asked anyone for help and now, all of a sudden, he’d apparently done that a thousand times. The Outbox still flashed before his weary eyes and only now did he see that the signals weren’t signed. They weren’t much at all, in fact. Just DISTRESS SIGNAL over and over again, to every underground computer currently in function. 

DISTRESS SIGNAL 0000478 DISTRESS SIGNAL 0000478  
DISTRESS SIGNAL 0000612 DISTRESS SIGNAL 0007001  
DISTRESS SIGNAL 0000953 DISTRESS SIGNAL 0000662  
DISTRESS SIGNAL 0001061 DISTRESS SIGNAL 0000413

All in all, they looked useless enough not to be used against the sender. The force of the hack was giving him away, though. Other than that, the location of the sender was hidden too, available only to those able to find their way through a mass of wires. Dirk could almost hear the rage cries of the underground hackers. Except for Roxy, maybe. She’d be too busy laughing at his expense. Probably. If she remembered him.

He got out of the useless folder and checked the data system. Government facilities had distressingly powerful batteries and he was just now thankful for that. It seemed like Hal would be able to keep functioning for at least three weeks without recharge.

The proverbial lightbulb got turned on in his head after finishing the routine checks. “Have you been here for the past few days?”

“I attempted a few strolls in the garden,” the voice rolled metaphorical eyes in his brain. “Am I right to assume you’re on the verge on asking me to play you back every conversation that has been held with you while you were under the influence?”

“Put me up to date,” he said and sat back, leaning on the cold wall behind him. If lucky, he could get ahead of his rescuers-slash-prison-guards before they checked on him again. He had a second thought. “And then connect me to Typheus.”

\---

John wasn’t back when Rose and Kanaya returned, but it wasn’t that surprising. Now that they had at least a temporary place to stay in, Rose had expected to see him less and less. It wasn’t unusual for her to wish for him to leave her somewhere and try and get as much of his life back as he could. She only told him this a few times before and he’d always returned. She was too much of a coward to let go of him now. She wondered when she’d become like this, and then white-hot pain ran through her calves and she got her answer.

The room Jane had offered her had a small window overlooking a narrow piazza below. There were a few market stalls offering dried vegetables and second-hand mechanicals, but nothing more. The lamps were shorter here than they were in Pompeii. Rose pulled her knees to her chest as soon as the image of crumbling, yellowy-white marble invaded her memory. The recollections were a little blurry due to the rush and to the state of her illness at the time, but she remembered enough to make the corners of her mouth fall.

They had only lived in Pompeii for a month or a little more than that, but it had been a good period for her. In comparison to other cities, Pompeii was bright, with its tall lamps and white and gold skyscrapers. Whether there was a lot of natural light to go around or not, the city always made it brighter. Weird as it sounded in theory, he had the feeling that it was actually diminishing her illness. If only she could stay out in the sun these days. She hadn’t seen any sign of it in weeks.

It was like the world was doing its best to make her feel as useless as possible. She couldn’t give it too much satisfaction. Every time the things inside overcame her, she felt like a captured pawn in a cosmic chess games, like the world had it exactly where it wanted her to be. There was something at the bottom of this plague; and she’s been taken out of the game before she could figure it out.

But she wasn’t dead yet, against all odds. She could still oppose it. With a painful movement, she got down from the chair beside the window and made her way downstairs. Jane was in a kitchen as small as a cupboard.

“I thought you would be resting a little longer,” she looked with glass-blue eyes at her and rubbed her hands on a small piece of cloth.

Rose only let her eyes wander to the counter for a second. “I haven’t done that much so far.”

“I see,” Jane smiled and turned a blue plastic bowl in her hands. “John went to look for a job early this morning.” Her tone sounded unexpectedly sympathetic. “I told him not to push himself. After all, it’s hard to find a job in a small city. He looks so pale, have you noticed? If I had the equipment, I would have given him a control, but like this, I can’t do much...”

Rose pressed her lips in a tight line, hands crossed over her small chest. “John’s not ill.” Jane blinked at her. Being acid wasn’t a smart decision, so Rose soon backtracked, ceasing eye contact. “I think he used to take stronger vitamins before, that is all.”

“Oh,” Jane nodded, visibly trying to be pacifying despite not believing her. “I will give him a double dose from now on, then. Have you ever baked a cake, Rose?”

Rose blinked, still standing in the doorway. Had she? “Not that I can remember.”

“Then I’ll give you a 101 training session. Come here,” Jane beamed and, despite ‘here’ meaning ‘closer to the knives on the wall’, Rose did as she was told.

It was better than to think of the perpetual dark circles under John’s eyes and of how lively and healthy he used to be when he went on errands with Dave six years before. She used to hear his laughter from five archive rooms afar.

She remembered her own self laughing at her brother’s expense after John had given him his first driving lesson. She remembered how shaken and hysterically amused Dave had been after the second. But then, she also remembered him holding a gun to John’s head as he was trying to break into her quarantine room, right before disinfestations.

\---

Outside of the city through the western gate, a dozen market stalls were assembled by rough-looking men and trolls, each with a vehicle behind them, to hold their products after the night was over. Most of the people were covered in multiple layers of oil-stained clothes and sweat and dirt were glistening on their hands and faces despite the overall low temperature of the area. Trolls have a higher body temperature than humans, averaging at 42°C, so Karkat’s hands were already verging on ice-cold in the night air. His breath created white puffs that the wind rapidly shook away.

“Don’t throw our money on unnecessary shits, alright?” he uttered in Dave’s direction, who was looking ahead at the vehicles residing at the edge of the market, before the dry and dusty plains. The perpetual clouds had parted to give them a glimpse at a black sky. No wonder it was so cold.

“When have I ever done that?” Strider smirked at him and jogged the last few metres towards the last merchant. “Any preferences?” he turned towards Karkat once he was there.

“Something stable will do,” he grimaced at the rusty pieces of locomotory machinery in front of them. There were a few hundred miles of empty fields until the next town and he knew from experience that it was a hard and stony road to take. Most of the things he saw here wouldn’t last them the night and that was if _he_ was driving.

Without staying to assist his partner with the check-ups, Karkat retreated in an empty spot beside the last stall and, to his own surprise, sat unceremoniously down on the ground. His legs ached. With hands almost numbed by the cold, Karkat dug into his backpack and pulled out a cylinder of vitamins. He hadn’t taken any in two days, so he took three pills now. Damn it, he always forgot. Before, they used to see the sun from time to time and the need for medication wasn’t that strong. Now, they were lucky to see a star at night.

He looked around while he swallowed them dry. The seller a few feet away from him was scrubbing a rifle back into a variably shining state. There were enough people looking at the merch, Lopah being the only big city on a radius of a few hundred miles, so nobody paid them any attention. Karkat looked away from them as he heard his name being called.

“Anything we forgot?” Strider asked, leaning on a medium-sized beige vehicle and holding its driver-side door open.

Karkat pushed himself up and dusted his pants before walking over. “What is there to forget? Does this thing work?” he eyed its unequal wheels with scepticism.

“Of course it works,” the other grinned. “Hop on.” And he disappeared into the driver’s seat. Karkat took a deep breath.

Once inside, he tied an untrustworthy belt around his waist. “You know the way?” he asked, but Dave was already tapping his tracking device. And almost bouncing on his seat like an idiot, Karkat noted.

“West-north-west for now,” Dave furled his device back up. There was a hint of a grin on his face. “Buckle up and enjoy the ride,” he revealed his teeth and pulled his goggles over his eyes. Only now did Karkat notice the lack of a wind screen.

“What—” but the wind filled his mouth before he could say another word and he was pushed against his seat as Strider started the car in almost full speed along the deserted area before them. There was a full-on manic grin on his face right now.

\---

There was a signal.

In the dimness of the room, Dirk leant forward to get a better look of the rapidly changing lines on the screen. One of them was constantly jolting upwards.

“Connect,” he said, cradling the unit in between his crossed legs. He had manhandled earlier a few variably disposable wires and some cloth into a crude lock for the door, just in case. 

Now that he knew what information he’d given away, he didn’t feel as angry as before. They didn’t get much, taking into consideration all the data residing in his head. He didn’t feel like they had anything to use against him despite, of course, being hunted by the government. That was a mistake on his part and he could only hope they were as neutral as they claimed. 

The computer paused. “Nope.”

The signal was still there, in plain view, unconnected. Dirk’s eyebrows furrowed together. “What do you mean, nope?”

“In technical terms,” Hal went on, its familiar voice heard only by its creator, thanks to the chip-connector, “you’re breaching protocol.”

Dirk must have spent too much time building robots, to think he could hear the sarcasm in this one’s words. Actually, he had done that most of his life, so it wasn’t hard to imagine. At least it was fun, compared to the other temporary shits he’d had to put up with.

Like joining the government. What was he thinking three years ago? He was drifting in and out of the underground by then, but he had someone on the inside to put him up to date. He also had Typheus on the outside, to do some anonymous hacking for him. He was settled. But then he was recruited and the irony of the situation made him eventually agree.

True, he’d had more resources than he could ever hope for and he’d been able to try out all his ideas when they weren’t looking, but he’d still had to make most of the AI units for the higher ups. Although calling them AI was a stretch, since they weren’t all that sentient. Just very intelligent computers. Hal was the real deal joined together with the others. Since they had some kind of brain merge, it was the perfect spy, although it had to keep being very subtle.

It was when the subtleness was no longer an option that Dirk chose to take Hal and make a run for it.

“Which protocol?” He remembered deactivating most of them before his flight, but there were always exceptions. 

On the screen, the signal lines were substituted with a clear crisp shot of top-notch example of programming. Since it was most certainly not made by him, he almost felt the need to fist-bump Hal. Above anything else, Dirk’s eyes travelled over the words: DATA COMPROMISING COMAND. He almost hiccupped.

“You got something?” he asked somewhat too quickly, feeling his fingers tingle in anticipation. This could be the discovery of his life. The hardest part would be to live long enough to share it with someone.  
“Affirmative,” was the answer and the unit went on safe mode almost immediately. “It would be safer for you to unlock the door now,” it also announced.

Very good; now he had a strong motivation to get out of this place. Before he got out of the governmental facility, he had a brief amount of time to let the AI unit connect to the main computer. Which was exactly the shitty move that let others catch on to his plans. If it wasn’t for that, Dirk would’ve fled the continent before they realised he was gone.

Not that there were many other places to fly to nowadays, anyway.

\---

Deep at night, the city never slept. If one was attentive, rattles and chatters of teeth could be felt in the air along with frugal whispers and the constant fidgeting of people not knowing what the next day had in plan for them. Nevertheless, once these were tuned out, the icy night air was silent.

They were in Hemera, Kanaya had explained to her, which was the closest city to Pompeii in the North. It was funny for a city named this way to be so gloomy, but it had been one of the first occupied by the military in the Winter War and it was still mending itself. Nothing was ever repaired; just patched up until the next blow. It was the same for the entire world.

With a steady hand, Rose circled the answer of another equation and then fit the blanket tighter around her body. It was easy to lose yourself in bad situations, so, ever since she’s been taken out of the underground, she’d kept revising old notions and data she once had to know by heart. She only wished she had access to more of them so she could, maybe, do something more worthwhile.

Her PDA was almost unusable. The ragged agent uniform she sometimes wore wasn’t even her own. Nobody had easy access to a connected computer without an ID. All outside computers were watched through the electrical net hovering somewhere in the sky above them and, while a particularly good hacker could escape it for a while, Rose didn’t trust her computer skills anymore.

Her training as an agent had been focused on fact-memory and close-combat skills. Both of these had basically been rendered useless by now. Back when they were younger, she used to strife with Dave and it was quite an enjoyable time to spend with family. They were pretty evenly matched, even though, with time, Dave had started to get closer to victory thanks to his better trainers. He was the one going to work on the outside, after all.

Rose hadn’t stopped wishing that he was still alive for a minute.

In the small room above the clinic, she put the papers away on the floor and rested her forehead on her knees. She seemed to be safe, for now. Safe meant she could concentrate on other needs too. Acquiring a fake ID, finding out more about what’s been happening in the world, doing some real research on her illness, she could try to do all these now, the city lacking Pompeii’s computerised security.

And if it was just a false sense of safeness, then she would only have herself to blame. It was liberating, to be able to take responsibility for her own decisions after all this time. It was nice not to look at every man as an enemy because of the things they could do to John.

He hadn’t come back yet.

She hoped her resolutions wouldn’t die away as soon as he’d be near her again. The crawling under her skin acted chaotically, quiet and deliberate every few hours, as if to reassure her that it was still there, as if to offer her a way out, as weird as that sounded.

Working in the archives, she’d had access to thousands of books, so she knew what a pact with a demon was. In retrospective, this was worse, since there was no going away after the contract was signed. There was also nothing to achieve from it.

Rose raised her eyes and, for the first time in a long while, she wondered at what point in time she’d got sick.

\---

The steering wheel was actually a square and an accident waiting to happen, but that did not seem to bother Dave in the least. They’ve already passed a hundred miles in this state of mind and now Karkat could kind of relax against his seat; or at least breathe without getting dust all the way to his air pumps. Dave was moving his gloved hands erratically over the square wheel and he had constant bursts of either laughter or incorrigible words.

The sound of wheels on rocks was almost drowning him out, though, so, when he started yelling louder, Karkat finally turned his head to look at him. “What,” he was stopped by an ecstatic glance being thrown his way, “the fuck,” he caught himself in time, “are you saying?”

Dave snickered before stilling his hands without slowing down. “A few years ago, there was this really cool song somewhere on the 4th level, some newbie found it on a memory stick. Man, I just wish I knew the words.”

Then he had a go at it again. Karkat rolled his eyes and looked up at the metal top of the vehicle. “Glad to know you haven’t joined a sect overnight and you were rehearsing midnight prayers.” They were going to be in the middle of nowhere for a few hundred miles still, so it did no harm except to his mental capacities. He blinked and looked back at his partner before forming the next thought. “Have you taken something?”

Dave gave him a shit-eating grin that even by bullshit levels was a little too wide. “Yep. Had two or three pills left.”

“You could’ve warned me, you know?” He grimaced to himself. “I could have you retrograded for this.”

The whine was soon to follow. “Come oon, I’m coming with you without asking questions, ain’t I? This is the least you could let me do.” Then the sigh. “ _Fine_ , this is the last time. Pinkie promise.”

Karkat’s unimpressed look lasted on him for a while longer, but he eventually relented. After all, in all of 5 years of working together, Dave had only smashed himself thrice. He guessed that, since every time it involved remembrances of members of the past, they ought to have a talk, but that was highly unprofessional. Besides, the farther away from personal matters they were, the better Karkat felt. Everybody had issues and they ought to be brought into discussion only if they endangered the mission.

He wasn’t really sure what reasoning his think pan was using to convince him that speeding through the fields on a collapsing vehicle wasn’t ‘endangering’ anything.   
Be that as it may, Dave was back to fleeting sounds he could not comprehend almost immediately. Karkat thought he reminded him a little of the lusus that he’d used to see when he was young. There were still a few hours remaining until sunrise; with any luck, they would reach the next stop by lunch. Which was it, now? Probably Gomorrah, or what had been left of it after the air raids.

It would have been easier to just sleep in the shade of a few rocks, but, after seeing that happening in Lopah, Karkat wanted to investigate. Naturally, he hadn’t reasoned like that with Strider. The more he rotated around subjects connected to his sister, the more opposition was going to arise. So, for now, they were just gathering information from the nearby cities, planning their way into Pompeii’s quarantined zone.

Karkat’s presumptions of Timaeus being either dead or still in the fallen city were verging on improbable, but there was no better place to start a search. If Timaeus was still in his right mind, then he would try to go as deep into the underground as possible, fast as he could go. He had enough of a mouth on him, he could trick most of the people he came across.

The problem was, the underground base in Pompeii had been shut down during the war because of leaky links. The rule was as such: if they infiltrated once, it’s compromised. There were the archives left under hundreds of tons of cement now, only to be accessed by a week’s travel in the sewers. All in all, Timaeus couldn’t have hid there and, hopefully, Karkat would be able to find his trail once he got to the city’s ruins.

He’d just have to be very meticulous.

\---

“Alright, uh,” this was nothing he’d expected to be subjected to right after finding out he had ultra-classified information a few clicks away, “I’ll leave these here and then you’ll just have to pick one of these. Er...” Although, to be honest, one forgets that not everyone is a movie protagonist, who receives dramatic music and unsteady combatants to deal with before figuring out the biggest mystery of the show.

Dirk looked at Tavros holding up two t-shirts, one bleached blue and one bleached green, evidently scrubbed until they admitted defeat and obviously a few decades old. He blinked. “I think I’ll go for green.”

The troll smiled thankfully at him and placed the item on the bed, over the pair of cargo pants he’d carried on his way in. “The jackets are right beside the door on your way out. Ah, you might not know, seeing as we’ve repaired the heating system not long ago, but it’s, uh, really cold.” As a finishing touch, he pushed forward a pair of boots Dirk hadn’t seen him carry on his way in. “There are socks too, so you won’t have trouble with your bandages,” the troll drummed his fingers on the nearby table. “Right. I’ll be outside, then, come out as soon as you’re ready...”

The door was left ajar as the other went out, so Dirk could see a narrow slice of empty hallway and an open room on the other side. Apart from the departing sounds of boot on wood, there were no other sounds. Straining his ears, Dirk heard a short rush of wind as a door has probably been opened and closed.

His body started moving without letting him think about it first and soon enough he was partly dressed, had boots better than his own on and was pulling the green t-shirt over his head. His stomach wound protested, but not very much, seeing as it was mostly numb from the medicine. Now that apparently he wasn’t being drugged anymore, Dirk tried to stay awake as long as he could, so he had a better grasp of what was going on around him. For once, there were seemingly only three people in this area of the forest.

He was ready now. Beside him, under the table, Hal was still sitting in the bag; he had half the mind to pull apart some of the floor’s wood and hide it under there, but decided against it. They had all the time to steal it until now and the lock-down protocol was still in place. For now, he only had to see what this newly received freedom was, so he stepped out on the hallway. Good thing he’d been pacing around the room lately, so the feeling in his feet was back.

The facility seemed eerily common. Just the right amount of guns and ammo lying around, looked like it had been lived in for quite some time, temperately warm air. Only when he reached the end of the hall and got closer to the windows did he see the frost gathered on the glass. How was frost even possible in this day and age?

There were half a dozen jackets hung beside the door and, suppressing his suspicions until later investigations, Dirk grabbed one and put it on. Despite the sudden warmth that enveloped him, like he’d put on a hundred layers instead of one, the thing still let him have perfect flexibility. Not for nothing, but he had to get one for himself too once he got out of here alive.

Outside, grass creaked under his feet like twigs and, looking down, he realised there was a thin layer of frost covering it too. He looked up, unshielded eyes squinting at the bit of grey sky and then at the tall trees. Must’ve been them purifying the water.

“Oh, there he is,” the troll looked from him to Jake, main ointment guy the one Dirk remembered stumbling his bleeding ass over the first day. He was sitting on a tree stump not too far away, looking mildly interested, although a little apprehensive. By the way, did everyone here have prosthetics? “Then, we can begin. The faster the start, the sooner the break, er, I guess...”

Dirk gave them a few seconds’ doubt, but no more words were said, the other two apparently getting ready to move somewhere. He guessed that, in those circumstances, he could unironically clear his throat. He also had a hard time not feeling a little disappointed by their lack of trust in his killing capacities.

“Are we doing something?” he eventually asked after a few tryout steps after the other two.

As if remote controlled, the human half of the party walked backwards until he got to his side. Strider had to give him some praise; that improvised leg didn’t seem all that easy to use. “We’re going to start the irrigation system. We can handle it. You just have to come along.”

“Why?” the question came too fast and for a minute he felt like Dave in his younger years, when he was still unable to suppress his curiosity for the sake of his cool. Still, knowledge was power. Sort of.

The other gave him a green-eyed look of uncertainty. “So there’s not a stranger left alone in our base camp.”

“Ah,” Dirk nodded. “Sure, that makes sense.”

Harley seemed to be out most of the time, he’d realised. That either meant the camp was a decoy, that she trusted these two to protect it or that no harm could come to it either way. Dirk suspected it was mostly the last part. From what he could see, there was nothing of importance here, just some dudes and lady staying out of the fucked system planted in the cities.

Even if his departure would not be allowed, he still had no intention of harming them, especially since they had mostly nothing on him. He could disappear before either of them had the time to report him. He didn’t know about Harley, but he suspected that she hadn’t gone so far either. She seemed to be very keen on staying neutral.  
“Don’t think you can’t still get shot.”

The statement was blunter than he’d expected and he eyed the pistols at Jake’s sides. He didn’t really feel threatened.

Maybe it showed on his face, because the next words were explanatory. “Not by me. Tavros has better aim with moving targets.”

Dirk let himself meet his eyes again; Jake was smiling, even if it didn’t change his face all that much. “Is that so?”

“I’d suggest you stay and abuse our medicine for a while longer before running away.”

His boots kicked a larger twig out of the way. Tavros, by now, was a hundred metres in front of them. “Why are you all so sure I’ll be running away?”

The other’s brows creased with confusion and Dirk thought he heard a sound made by someone pressing hard on metal. “Why would you stay?”


	4. Sleep Deprival

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-apocalyptic college students.  
> Too bad the coffee's gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, well. It should become relatively more fluid from now on.

After descending a few storeys of metal staircases and then taking a lift for an unaccountable amount of time, Vriska finally stopped in front of a door and opened it without too much flourish. John could only keep his breath levelled while watching her do all this. They were deep underground; deeper than he’d been in ages.

“Come in, John. We always love visitors,” she grinned mockingly at him, letting the metal door close behind her. John followed her inside before it clicked shut.

Inside, John’s eyes swiftly scanned a large room, dominated by metal tables and various screens and computers. His heart eased its movement the slightest bit; at least it was not an interrogation hall. There were only two other people inside, aside from them, and they paid them close to no mind.

John didn’t know what he’d been expecting. Maybe firearms directed at his chest and people tackling him to the ground. For the first time in many years, a thought occurred to him: what was a deserter among this many people? He was insignificant.

Vriska’s touch on his arm reminded him swiftly that he wasn’t. “Do take a seat, I’d love to hear all about your adventures,” she mocked further, sitting down in the closest computer chair.

There was a faint sizzling in the air. John sat down beside her and made the mistake of making eye contact. He visibly winced; her eyes looked furious. “Nothing to hear,” he ducked his head because he knew that it was easiest to make yourself humble in a losing situation.

Except he should have expected her to be angered by that attitude. “Nothing to hear? Oh, excuse me, I forgot how boring life gets on the outside. It’s clearly less exciting than what we do down here, isn’t it? I expect you built a hut on a hilltop overlooking a green valley, have you not? Any waterfalls around? Lalonde would’ve loved them.”

He didn’t look up until Rose’s name had been mentioned and when he did, his appearance shattered. Vriska was facing him with her hands crossed over her chest, more intimidating than most humans and trolls alike, but her cerulean-lined pupils widened for a second just there.

“Did I make you angry, Johnny?” she smirked.

He couldn’t take deep breaths. “I’m not allowed to be here,” he said through gritted teeth, hands unconsciously gripping his chair until they whitened.

She scoffed. “Of course you are. You’re my visitor. Basically a member of the family.”

It just occurred to John that sound wasn’t travelling right through the room. There was no echo, despite the metallic walls and he couldn’t hear anyone tapping at their computers. He was expected to actually talk here. “What do you want from me?”

She drummed her fingers beside an old keyboard. “Exactly what I said. You’ve been invisible for six years. What have you done?”

“Why don’t you just look in my head?” he watched her again, needlessly curious, only to see her shrug. It brought back memories.

“Why should I make it easy for you?” she asked off-handedly. They didn’t say anything for minutes, which was just as much as she needed to grow bored. Her eyes scanned him and John raised his guard even more. “You look like you’ve been swallowed and puked by at least a dozen marine animals,” she commented, letting the other subject drop momentarily, much to his amazement, and got out of her chair.

Something inside his brain was continuously nagging him to talk, talk, talk, dammit, if she wanted you dead you would’ve been in rigor mortis already, but he didn’t trust himself enough for that. It was easy around Rose, who already knew everything, and around Equius, who wasn’t even part of the underground and talked little about everything, but here he was finally in the presence of someone whom he’d known. Someone to whom he could talk as normal people do. Someone who, indefinitely, could use every word he said against him somehow.

He hadn’t talked to someone in years, not since after he’d poured all his feelings on a plate to Rose, a year after running away. He was almost hysterical to find out how much he’d regressed as a human being. Why had he struggled to stay alive those past years? What had he done with that life?

Vriska dumped a load of navy clothes in his lap. He’d been too far away to see her moving, so the action got a yelp out of him and he heard her snicker. At a second look, he saw that he’d just been given a brand-new uniform. Well, as new as it would ever be.

“Take those and grab the others from the lockers. You need to shower, so follow me.” Her tone was vaguely different now, less personal and, this time, he made the conscious decision to follow her.

He was disgusted to feel his heart leaping with hope, so he guessed he ought to be the one crushing it. “I’m not coming back in.” His throat tightened.

“Who said anything about bringing you back?” she asked without turning her head, a mass of black hair dominating John’s view.

He looked at the uniform again. Against his own, ragged to bits, it looked almost flamboyant. “Are you trying to make me a target?” He felt like every agent in the world would see him if he were wearing this outside. He tried to remember ever putting something similar to this on and feeling safe.

“So it’s true that the renegade life crumbles one’s mental facilities,” she mused and pushed open another door. These were truly lockers. “Go in, take a long shower, have a shave and knock when you’re ready. We’ll talk after.”

\---

After a full night’s drive and a couple hours of unrestful sleep, Dave woke up in the car with a most treacherous headache. He wasn’t gonna take any stimulating pills again anytime soon. His thoughts were a mess, sitting like scrambled eggs in his head at the moment and only a wave of nausea had stopped him from calling Vantas by Egbert’s name.

“You’re just never going to fucking learn, are you?” Vantas asked him from the driver’s seat after stopping the engine so Strider could puke his guts outside. His condescending tone was everything one could need to get over a hangover. That, and the blue bottle of bitter liquid being passed to him. 

“Thanks. Let’s forget last night happened,” he took two gulps and gave it back. Just as soon, the vehicle started moving again.

“I wish my hearing ducts could forget your awful wailing so soon. Oh, excuse me, I meant singing.” Vantas took a curb and now they had grey mountains to look forward to. The dusty fields had passed to make way for dry trees and ruins and, finally, they were on a real road.

Strider frowned, only vaguely remembering an agreement to stop in the nearby cities for more information. He would’ve been much more content with going the clean straight-line way to Pompeii’s vicinity, but that would’ve meant he’d have to take over the expedition and he wasn’t in any mood for making plans. Better to leave Vantas do his job; he was in his element, at least.

“Don’t diss the singing, I’ve heard you doing that too.”

“Did not,” Karkat squinted at the vaguely-lit metal boards at a crossroads before taking a sharp turn for the left, towards the mountains.

Dave leant back in his awful seat. “Sure did. But I would walk a thousand miles and I would walk a thousand more,” he grinned, humming in a low voice.

The other pressed his lips together and avoided a fallen tree carcass. Eventually, he glanced at him, contempt icy in his gaze. “It’s five hundred.”

Expressions were hard to do while being subjected to a headache and a slight drug overdose, so Dave steeled his face from here on. “We could have a sing-along until we get there, you know?”

“I have no idea what that means, but it sounds as dumb as you look.”

Point taken; Strider pulled his goggles back over his eyes. He could already discern the road going up and around the mountain from where they were right now and he wondered how much it had taken people to build it before the invasion. These structures were hard to maintain. Geography books showed him that, once, there were tunnels and highways all around. This was only slightly easier to comprehend than the fact that most of the Earth’s surface was covered in vegetation.

“Permission to ask a question.”

Vantas gave him a sideways look. “Who the fuck do you think you are, Skywalker?” and after a moment’s pause: “Granted.”

“What are we doing with Timaeus once we find him?” He figured this was as good a time to ask as any. They haven’t spoken about their mission at all since they set out, but the questioning air was always there.

Karkat had a sharp intake of breath. “If we find him – you know how slithery he is, like a fucking ectoplasmic fetus – we’ll do what we have to do according to the circumstances at hand.”

Dave waited, but nothing more was said, so he motioned uselessly with a hand. “Which are...?”

“Which aren’t. We’ll decide what they are when we’re there so we can evaluate the situation better,” he ran over a bump in the road and Dave was impressed he didn’t bite his tongue.

“Which is a fancy way of saying we’ll cross that bridge once we get to it,” Strider nodded to himself.

Karkat did the troll equivalent of growling, which was, pretty much, a higher pitched growl in itself, but kept driving at the normal speed. “If you think there’s going to be a bridge, you’re overconfident. The best we can do is find out what exactly he’s stolen and not get killed in the process.”

“You mean the AI unit? What can be there that Ampora hadn’t told us before getting blasted? Or Megido, for that matter.” She, unlike Eridan, had been a lower level spy and inspected the installation. That was, of course, until she’d been caught too and had her brain turned to mush in an electric chair.

“They knew we had spies. There was no reason to demolish Pompeii over information we already had,” the car entered the first stone tunnel.

Strider focused on the gray dot at the end instead of the darkness all around. His voice echoed vaguely. “If you ask me, I think they couldn’t wait for a chance to blow something up.”

The other shook his head. “Too important, too big. Pompeii was the biggest city in the East, they wouldn’t have sacrificed that strategical spot on a whim.”

They passed the tunnel and they were flanked by gray mountains. At merely a couple metres to their right were abrupt, ancient walls of rock. To their left was a ravine that had once probably held a river and, after that, another giant mound of stones. Up above, they couldn’t see the tops because of the low, soggy clouds dominating the sky. It was terrifying, like a natural prison or torture site, but urban legend said these mountains had once been travelled for fun.

“Alright. So, what do we have so far? We know the guy was once one of us, but shit knows who exactly. He’s worked for the big tough guys for a few years, right?”

“Around five,” Karkat agreed.

“Right. Did he help us during this time? I don’t think so. Hey, do we have to get him alive? What if he’s a double agent? That’s some no-no stuff for me.”

“He was a double agent, shitmouth. And we’re not killing anyone with his qualifications. Keep dreaming, Strider.” There were stones in the way, but somehow they managed to go around them without falling in the ravine.

“Do you know him?”

The question fell in the air like a stone avalanche from high above. Upon closer inspection, Vantas looked like he’d been pulled very thin or pressed really hard. “No,” he said eventually, much too late for either of them to pretend it was the truth.

\---

He’d left the room a short while after Jade had started explaining the stitches she’d had to give a man during her latest voyage to Nix. Jake was okay with most surgical interventions, as long as they were not taking place after dinner and while the subject did not have anything green or yellow protruding from their gash. Jade’s story, in detail, went against all these conditions.

Using the back door, Jake got outside, taking a deep breath of the twilight air. It hurt his teeth and almost instantly seeped into his toes, but the walk towards the second cabin wasn’t a long one. The door was locked, so he fished for his key with slightly numb fingers.

He didn’t spend much time here, since the other cabin was bigger (and the heating system stronger), but he still kept his personal belongings in his assigned room. It was a most depressing sight, if he was to say so himself; his trekking backpack, long-range firearms, climate-controlled clothes, various devices and bags in long journeys. 

At first glance, it felt like he hadn’t had his leg blasted off by a landmine all those years ago. It felt like he could just pick his backpack up and be on his way, leave Jade and Tavros behind with a simple, light-hearted promise to see them again one day. He’d go anywhere, as long as he could go somewhere.

“Keep dreaming, chap,” he smiled without humour and took a seat on the empty bed, gripping his artificial knee a little harder than the other one.

He wasn’t going to spend the rest of the day pitying himself, though. That was not what he had come there for. He had a small, black computer hidden (for no reason) under his pillow, and that was what he’d been looking for.

After a short check-up on its batteries, Jake pressed the necessary buttons to bring it to life and waited as lines of data rolled over the screen. Man, what a piece of garbage. He’d bought it in the years before the war from a merchant in the East and hardly ever used it since. There weren’t many things he could do with it, but today it was finally going to be useful again.

“Let’s see,” he rolled a finger over the screen, trying not to be clumsy. More lines erupted under his touch, but they meant nothing to him. “Come on, what will you have me do?” he continued to mumble and tried tapping it. At once, the menu looked more familiar. “Please be there,” he held his breath and taped on a flat line.

_Greetings!_

_Roxy, I don’t have the greatest faith in this machinery’s battery lasting, so I’ll be brief. We’ve had a, how would you say, “guest” over in our compound for the past two weeks and I was wondering if you could give us a hand in how to better acquaint ourselves with him. I need you to do some research, Roxy. I haven’t told Jade about this because I am not sure she wants to hand him over to anyone yet, but you know how she is, she sometimes lets her ego get the best of her. Please don’t tell her anything before you tell me. No offense, of course. I just want to make sure she won’t start unfounded speculations before we’re sure of anything. Have you heard of a Dirk Strider, Roxy?  
I must go, but send your response to my archive as soon as you can. Gosh, it’s been forever. I hope you’re well._

_Jake._

The computer was not yet dying, but he was going to need it for reading the eventual reply too. Electricity was in short supply and troublesome and this was one of the reasons his external relations were so scarce. Jake had met Roxy around the time he took shelter in this forest. She worked in the underground compound beneath Nix and she’d decided to cut through the forest when coming back from a visit in the north.

They had talked plenty of times at first, while Jake was still adapting to the sedentary life and the loss of his limb, but soon after that the routine got the best of them. Well, at least of Jake, since he was sure Roxy was having a blast and full-on hackery adventures back in her lair. He wished his leg could carry him far enough to visit her, but he’d already tried and got stuck one-third of the way toward the city.  
The computer was soon enough set back in its place and Jake let himself lay for a couple minutes in bed. He felt more frustrated than usual for no particular reason. His hands itched to move. He could not stay still.  
Well, he guessed he could always offer to watch over their guest while the other two carried on with their daily activities. It beat feeding the squirrels, that’s for sure.  


\---

  


Chemically adjusted water smelt like burnt rocks and tasted vaguely of metal but, hot as it was, it was the best thing John had felt on his skin in years. For all he knew, he could die the moment he stepped out of the room, but this, right now, felt good. He inhaled through his mouth and realised he was trembling.

There were things stuck in his hair, on his back where he couldn’t see them, there were cuts he’d never been aware of on his palms and face and shoulders. He thought he had been clean after almost using up all of Jane’s water, but the common filters still left the water half-useless. The underground, on the other hand, had had enough bright minds to improve their machinery over time.

The water moved fast over his skin and it was at the same time strange and familiar. He tried to scrub as much as possible, get rid of as many memories of the outside world as he could, as if, by becoming clean again, he’d never have to return up there. But he’d never be truly clean, not quite. Not when he had lived so many lives, neither of them truly his, each of them an opportunity to fuck up bigger and better and him never letting them down.

With his last bit of self-indulgence, John closed his eyes and rested his forehead on one of the shower’s walls. He tried to imagine how a stranger had once been, hundreds of years before him; somebody with his face and his voice and maybe even his name; somebody not born every 70 years out of a slime ball, trying to relive his original life in a universe that no longer allowed it. He could not.

When he got out, the pleasant feeling of the warm water had given in to a slight nausea, but he was stable enough to shave in front of a strangely glossy mirror. With a good blade in his hand, the learnt movement came back to him and it was easy. He also chose to keep the razor, pushing it in one of the new uniform’s pockets.

He didn’t stop to look at the clothes and ponder the significance they’d hold in Vriska’s mind, choosing to just put them on before the heat left his skin. He wasn’t getting this treatment on the house, that much was obvious (Vriska had never been the charitable kind of girlfriend and he very much doubted she was going to be any different as an ex), but if she wanted him to do something for her, she could have just as well manipulated him into doing it for free. John wasn’t going to complain.

She was waiting for him when he knocked on the door, since it was unlocked swiftly. Back in the hallway and he was subjected to an unsubtle grimace as she looked over his wet hair. “You sure took your sweet time.”

“I thought you’d return to work,” he shrugged and ignored the drops dripping off his glasses.

“As if,” Vriska scoffed and pushed her hair out of her face with a gesture John remembered unexpectedly well. “How long have you been here?”

The razor had ended up in his breast pocket, so John had the unexpected freedom of hiding his hands. “Since the fall of Pompeii.”

She cackled. “Is that where you’ve been hiding?”

“One location.” He didn’t know why he added, “I’m not stupid.”

“No, you’re not, but you’re a fucking idiot.” She signalled for him to follow her to the stairs again and he complied, feeling a little uncomfortable in the new pair of boots, but relatively thankful for the distraction they provided. “People down south looked for you for months, like feral animals. Strider was more pissed than I’ve ever seen him and you and Lalonde kept appearing and disappearing all over the place. Heard you got quite a few good beatings along the way too.” She looked back at him and smiled uncharacteristically good-naturedly. “Glad somebody took care of avenging my broken heart.”

Silently, John pressed his lips in a thin line, which was all the answer she needed to keep on smiling. He didn’t even have the occasion to properly break up with her at the time, he just remembered. Who cared about those things, he tried to counter, but he still felt guilty. The year they’d been together had been the best period of his life. Not just because of Vriska, of course. Things just seemed to work at the time, and the fact that he could also associate her with that feeling had let him remember her with a peculiar warmth. Now she was cold, as cold as he felt, cold as the colour of her matured irises, of the shirt she still wore underneath her black jacket.

When their footsteps’ echoes were the loudest, he finally asked. “What do you want me to do for you?”

Vriska grinned and tapped on a steel door, opening up an archive room. “No rush, Johnny. Just a couple errands.”

\---

In the end, they only had to shoot three people in order to enter Gomorrah, which was good, by anyone’s standards. Karkat had had the occasion to test out the new ammunition and Dave could feel the pain leave his head as soon as he got his eye on the target. Puny crooks, trying their luck outside the mountain resort’s walls.

Being a military city flanked on all sides by steep peaks, Gomorrah wasn’t one of the most friendly places standing. Its buildings were low and long, two-storey compounds covering acres of land, and its streets were wide enough for military troops to walk in 5-file formations. The civilians were scarce and paranoid, having suspicions about everyone around them, while the royal militia and most of the patrol troops were wasting time in the facilities closer to the border.

Karkat, however, was moving easily along the streets (having left their vehicle at the southern entrance), walking with something that Dave was tempted to call a soldier’s grace. His moves weren’t as slick as a spy’s and not as refined as an assassin’s, but they had a nonchalance about them that often eluded the untrained eye.

Dave followed him without too many comments as they strolled towards the eastern centre of the city, keeping his goggled on his forehead so he could inspect their surroundings in the grey-ish orange of the dusk. He’d heard that the sky was tinted orange and red in the evening only in the mountains, but he hadn’t thought it true. He guessed that it was normal since somewhere, out there, outside their atmosphere, something was burning.

“Look at this piece of shit,” Vantas rested his hands on his hips as he appraised, mildly impressed, the contents of one ground-floor room. He’d been looking for a place to sleep for the past couple of streets.

Strider leant over the doorway and looked inside, careful to avoid the annoyed eye of the middle-aged woman who was probably the one renting it. He whistled. “Looks like a stone-age relic. How did you know about my deepest desires?”

“I’ve drawn the conclusion after examining your IQ,” the other rolled his eyes and offered the woman three thick coins. Expensive, but they had an exit to the main lane. 

The moment they were inside and the door was locked as tightly as possible, Karkat started taking off his external gear, the one made up of a third bulletproof layer masked in a dark jacket, straps that could be used in case of bone or muscle injury to their limbs and a most uncomfortable array of small blades hidden in every crevice. Dave had always hated that attire since it made his movements stiff and awkward but his partner never seemed to have any problems with it. 

Finally, he took off his backpack too and settled it on a stone table. “I’m going to check on the eastern gate.”

“What, alone?” Dave heard the unintended incredulity in his tone and then he looked at Karkat’s distinctly leaner form due to the lack of half of his gear. “And naked?”

The other had the decency to raise an eyebrow, black-red irises unimpressed in their yellow sclera. “I still have four layers of clothes on.” He sighed. “But fine,” and, as a conclusion, returned a pair of black pistols to their thigh holsters. “Better?” he spread his arms at his side and Dave offered him a shrug.

“Have fun. You could’ve napped first,” Dave offered matter-of-factly, splayed on his back on the bed. Fuck outer-gear; he would be asleep in less time than it would take him to undress. Not that he was going to sleep if Vantas went out, but it was the thought that counted.

On his part, Karkat managed to unravel a hood Dave never knew existed from their presumably identical jackets and pull it over his head. “I want to reach it during the patrol change.”

Fair enough. Dave said as much and just as soon, he was alone in the stone room, feeling like in a fancy tomb with a window. That last bit was most unfortunate, since he couldn’t risk contacting Captor and being overheard or overseen. With that distraction out of the way, the only thing left for him to do in order to keep awake was to stand up reluctantly and rummage in Karkat’s backpack for more headache medicine and some energy buzz. Since the meds and the ammo weren’t divided in between them, there was nothing of need in his own backpack.

That way, he resisted for a couple of hours, pacing the narrow, long room and looking unsuspiciously out the window. There was nothing to see aside from a few patrols pacing up and down the street from time to time and a few old men and women staring at each other from their own windows. He thought he’d heard children from across the street once, but he was either going mad or they had been shushed in an instant.

There was also this place in one far corner of the room where, if he stood upright and breathed quietly, Dave could hear whispers from upstairs. Obsessed, quiet but rapid rants of an old man about how the world was going to end soon and the chiding of a woman who said that the world had ended decades ago.

It was during such eavesdropping that the knocks on the door started.

\---

This was going to turn into so much shit, Jake thought as he watched Jade put thick magnetic handcuffs on Dirk’s wrists. He, for one, actually winced once she powered on the magnetic field and they clanged together, but their ‘guest’ didn’t even blink. Thank to some unspeakable force, Jade was also quick to turn the atrocious things off.

He wondered where she’d been the last few days, off to acquire these things. Probably sneaked in the military compound past Nix, since you couldn’t find something like this on any market, black or not. Jake watched the other’s hands, fallen at his sides and he wondered if the metal was heavy.

“You understand the situation I’d be in if I didn’t do at least this, don’t you?” Jade asked Dirk and Jake felt his shoulders relax because of course Jade was only taking precautions, not abusing current or former government agents because of past grudges.

Dirk makes a movement to rub his wrist in fake relaxation, only to see that the metallic bands would not budge. “Yes. You could’ve chosen a smaller model, though,” he still replied, without breaking his monotonous tone.

Jade gave him a smirk at that. “Next time I’ll send you to get them yourself, big boy. But, for now, we wouldn’t want any part of the militia suspecting us, would we? Took the least suspicious item.” She knocked on one handcuff without getting any sounds out of it. “Jake?”

She hadn’t turned towards him, so Jake took a step to the right and looked at her. “Yes?”

“Go into the guest room and bring that bag over here. I’ve been curious for ages,” she flashed him a wide grin and he took off immediately, only hearing a few hushed words coming from Dirk before reaching the hallway.

The room was colder than the rest of the cabin because nobody had stayed in it since that morning, and the smell of wood and forest that had somehow slipped through the walls was distractingly strong. Still, Jake eyed the bag under the table and started easing himself in a crouching position, good leg before bad leg, wincing as his artificial knee made sounds it was not supposed to.

It wasn’t supposed to do most of the things it did nowadays, but Jake couldn’t find enough time to mind that in between dealing with the atrocious pain the cold weather was sending through his thigh. “Golly, you’re heavier than you look,” he let out a breath as he heaved the bag over his shoulder and stood up unsteadily.

Upon returning, he found both Jade and Dirk at the kitchen table and he wished with a passion that Tavros was not out on his morning shift. He wished with a passion that no conflict would erupt in the next ten minutes and he instantly knew it was hopeless.

Don’t get him wrong, Jake had nothing against a good, old fashioned tussle once in a while, especially not after being forced by circumstances to get bored to death in the middle of an empty forest, but Jade had broken into a military base to get handcuffs and Dirk had a government ID and something obviously important in the piece of metal Jake was currently carrying and so many things could go wrong.

Still, he put the bag on the table in between the other two and waited for a couple seconds while they finished their staring contest. “There we have it. Sit down, Jake.” Jake sat, careful not to start drumming his fingers on the table. “Shall we?” Jade spoke again, this time toward Dirk, who had his hands crossed over his chest and his back leaned against the chair in the most condescendingly-defensive stance.

“I told you, my computer is on lockdown,” he uttered every word clearly and slower than his usual pace and Jake found his eyes drifting to the bag again. That metal box was a computer? Gosh, things sure had changed outside.

“I heard you. Let’s see it, anyway. I have quite a few hobbies of my own, I’d like to sneak a peek.” Jade’s carefree tone was one of the most terrifying things, along with her smile, when one could see in her eyes just how much she wasn’t joking.

Jake had thought Dirk would just keep on opposing her, so he was surprised when the other sighed and handled the bag with bandaged and handcuffed hands. The only bits of skin Jake could see were his fingers, calloused and just thin enough to let him handle small bits of electronics or whatever it was he did with his time before.

When the metallic unit was halfway out of the bag, Dirk raised bright amber eyes and fixed them on Jade. “Geez, Harley, have some cultural sensitivity. To a robo-nerd like me this verges right on voyeurism.”

Jake had to hide his smile with his hand when the girl flipped him off. Nothing else came out after the box-thing, so that meant that was the entirety of the computer. He wondered if it was even accessible in this state.

With another melodramatic sigh, Dirk turned the unit on its longer side and left it like that. After giving Jade another look, he pushed at the surface and blue lines spread over it. Now, this was something even Jake could recognise. Dirk tapped one finger twice and the menu sprung on screen. Then, he passed it to Jade and leant back again in his chair.  
“Great. Let’s see your baby pictures now, Mr Strider,” Jade grinned and pulled the unit closer to her.

It surprised him, but when Jake turned from her to take in Dirk’s silent reaction, the other was watching him. Not the computer which probably included all kinds of secret work, not Jade, currently being a peeping Tom about it, him. Jake’s eyes widened. Dirk made a show of glancing at the computer, then back at him, and winking.

\---

For a few moments, John had thought he would never get to see this disgusting, continuously cloudy and polluted sky again. Now he was outside again, feeling less cold inside the newer layers of uniform and slightly less lost with a razor in his pocket and a working portable computer in his inside-pocket. He was still at a loss about his current state of being, but he couldn’t dwell on that right now, not when he owed Vriska things.

He had to go to the other side of the city, meet an old man Jenkins, pay him with money she gave him, get whatever things the man had for him and bring them to her. All by tomorrow evening. It wasn’t much work, especially with so much time at hand, but Vriska dismissed him with the excuse of it being his first errand.

John had had half a mind to get it over with right then, since it was only early evening, but then he remembered he’d probably spent the night in the underground and Rose and Jane didn’t expect him to be gone for so long, so he probably ought to go there first. After all, who knew if Jane was going to let Rose live there with him gone? It was suspicious.  
Moreover, he had a computer now. He had to disable its tracking program and try and get a hold of his other work. His head felt a little fuzzy, but that was probably the lack of vitamins. In fact, he pondered as he walked down the clustered streets of Hemera, his whole body felt weird. His hair stuck at weird angles and the wind pushed it into his face, his skin felt thinner and he felt somewhat lighter. All because of that damned shower.

Before he realised it, he had reached the clinic and he instinctively went for the back door. There was light in the patients’ room, so nobody heard him come in. He went up the stairs as soundlessly as he’d been taught long ago and then slipped in his room. Darkness and musty smells welcomed him, but still his shoulders relaxed the slightest bit.

The boiler downstairs must have been on, since the air was warmer than the one outside, so he discarded his jacket and, at a second thought, his boots before sitting slowly on the mattress. His brain seemed to sigh after further movements, pulling up his feet, lying on the bed, closing his eyelids, but John almost scoffed at the thought.

He was already halfway through decoding the computer when there was a single tap on the door and Rose peeked in. When he caught her eyes, she looked almost crushed by the sight of him, which wasn’t something new. After surviving for so long with someone, liking them was only a luxury.

Although he liked Rose; or, at least, he remembered liking her. She was fun to be around in their first years. Rose was, and continued to be, smart and horribly patient. Were they not so sick and tired of sticking around on this Earth, maybe they would have talked more, like they used to.

She was still there, now. Rather, she was in his room, having closed the door and taken a seat on one of the boxed lying around. She was quiet and she had the same silent, silent breathing as ever. No atrocious plague had changed that. It looked like she had many questions he did not want to hear. In fact, John didn’t want to hear much of anything in that moment. Finally, Rose settled for only one.

“Are you hungry?” her eyes had dark circles around them and her face was pale, but still she was the one to look upon him with something resembling pity.

John had a half-formed dismissal in his head, but then the ache of hunger hit him hard and he nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”

It took her a while to stand up, as if the weight of all the things she wished to say kept her in place, but eventually Rose went out of his room and her steps could be heard going down the stairs. John pressed a few more times at the computer and finally he was untraceable.

He set it aside soon after that to receive a box of white, soft-looking sponge and six tablets of vitamins. He looked up as soon as Rose had set them in his palm and she shrugged. “Cake. And Jane thought you should take more vitamins for a while.” While talking, her gaze found the discarded jacket on the bed and then went over him to analyse the rest of his attire. John had tried to keep his expression as blank as possible. “Are you alright?” Rose asked, now examining his hair.

Despite knowing it would be painful, John forced a big mouthful of sponge down his throat before replying. “I’m fine. It’s...nothing. Don’t worry.” Words in the wind, for all either of them cared.

“If you say so,” she shrugged again and distanced herself from him, going for the door. “Be careful, John.”

He almost laughed. “When am I not?” He looked up at her with an awful smile, but she didn’t return it.

Rose knew better. He was always a little less than careful. Always a little too rushed, a little thoughtless, always overlooking something. Sometimes more than others. What he did next was going to attest to that.

The computer, achieving proper connection, signalled a new message when John was only halfway through his food, chewing the pills along with it.

K448_TT_HAL: Timaeus to Typheus, come in Typheus.  
K448_TT_HAL: For fuck’s sake, I’m breaching protocol. Hurry up.

John’s hands brushed the screen only for seconds.

H413_EB_TYP: i’m here.

\---

Looking back on it, Dave didn’t know what had been in their heads when they had knocked, but maybe that stood to show that people really weren’t made with all their mental faculties intact anymore. He was crouched behind the table with both his pistols before the door even cracked open.

The first bullet missed his head by inches, so he shot blindly behind himself two times, without luck. He risked a quick glance behind and counted four people, clad in ragged clothes and dirtier than the sewer system. Well, those were new. He’d expected the patrols to come and say hi, but nothing more.

Two more fires and a few grumbles. What were they, bounty hunters? The narrow space between the bed and the table didn’t let more than one of them pass at a time, but that seemed to be of no matter to them, as a buff troll took charge of going ahead and another female one scaled the bed for the same purpose. 

Whatever, it was already clear he didn’t have smart competition this time, so what was delaying him? Dave ducked almost as low as the floor the moment the male troll reached the end of the table and pulled his hood over his head before he shot skyward. Right on. Mustard blood spilled on his forehead.

Then he pushed himself upright and fired the other gun at the female troll, only to get her in the arm. There were two more humans staying by the door, constantly shooting at the far wall, so Dave hurried to get to a safer spot. That meant behind the female troll. Who was just now lunging at him, so that was plenty convenient.

Except it wasn’t that convenient anymore when her claws made acquaintances with his throat. It wasn’t bad enough to make him gag or stop his breathing, but it was enough to make him miss shooting at her heart.

“You piece of shit!” she screeched at his face right as one claw dug deep into the back of his neck and Dave kicked at her legs before having enough space to hit her abdomen. It was ridiculously hard and alright, now he wasn’t getting enough oxygen anymore.

He tried without much success to knock their heads together before dropping one gun and digging his freed fingers deep into the bullet wound he’d made in her arm earlier. The female troll trashed, pressing harder on his neck for a moment before her wounded arm started to give out. He only needed one moment. The next, his remaining gun was under her chin and the pull of the trigger shook them both.

One of his hands and part of his face were now coated in teal blood and he kept the limp body of the troll in front of him, using it as a shield against the others’ gunfire. They hadn’t advanced much, which was disconcerting because he’d probably been fighting with the other two for a couple minutes. The humans’ position by the door told him there were others to come, and soon.

Gunshots pierced the dead female troll as Dave adjusted his stance. At this rate, it was only a matter of time before he’d only have rags in his hands and one bullet would reach him, so he lunged toward the other two at full speed. Luckily, they didn’t have time to react, so one of them was knocked to the ground by his dead companion’s body, while the other stepped out of Dave’s path at the last second. It wasn’t such a lucky move, since Dave was already planning to shoot that way. Two of his bullets planted themselves into the one’s leg and pelvis and the pain stopped him from using his gun accordingly.

Also because of the trashing, Dave chose to shoot at his heart instead of his skull, but it still worked, so there was no harm done. In a split second, he turned towards the other man, took his gun faster than the other had time to register and pushed him back to the ground, beside the dead body, with a teal-coloured hand pushing at his carotid.

The man looked pathetic and smelled strongly of piss. Dave smiled. “Thanks for knocking.” Much to his amusement, the other tried to stand up. Dave kneeled over his legs calmly. “Now tell daddy who’s the alpha,” he grinned, because he knew how terrifying others found that in him. The wide-eyed man mumbled in horror, which was fun and all, but not at all informative, so Dave pressed a gun to his temple. “Who sent you?”

Still no answer, but the one under him wheezed. They had to get away, Dave mused, remembering the fact that others might be on their way there. He pulled a face and looked down again. “Are you going to tell me?” He didn’t feel like pressing the issue any longer. There were enough people who could want them dead and he didn’t give a shit which one of them had sent unprepared mercenaries this time. He placed the gun’s end in the man’s left eye and pulled the trigger.

“Right.” Dave stood up and looked himself over. 

He was a mess of tricoloured blood and he didn’t know how much of these losers’ smell had stuck to him, but he wasn’t going to hang around waiting for it to settle. He wiped his hands and face on bed sheets and grabbed both his and Karkat’s backpacks, along with the other’s outer gear, and made for the door. Looking back, the sight of four motionless, variably brained bodies looked almost right. His boots had left a few bloody imprints on the floor, but that was no matter.

The weird part was that no patrol had stopped to enjoy the show. Still, it couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes. Dave closed the door and went on marching up the street, saying a silent goodbye to his hopes of a quick nap.

\---

_(jake OHMIGOSHH)_

_Alright, my boss is watching me so I can’t use my super excitement powers at full blast, but I am virtually flailing my arms at you. Can you see them move? They’re moving for you, Jake! You’re a wishing well of good luck! I knew the instant I saw you that you had tiny leprechaun blood inside you. I’ll tell you aaaall about them next time I see you._  
Which will be soon, I hope, if you know what’s right for ya! Because you, Jake English, are gonna move a couple Harley mountains and bring that orange-eyed hotshot of a guest over here. I’m gonna check a few ways to get here and send them to you as soon as I can. The situation here sucks so much ass, but I believe in you, Jakey. You’re the man.  
Don’t fret your funky pants, I’ll give you all the information once all three of us are safely down here in our fancy as hell den. Just make sure to have Jade covered if you’re not intent on telling her about our little soon-to-be transaction. ;)  
Gosh, Jake, you’re a ray of sunshine. Remember the sun, Jake? That’s you. Right there, up and away from us and making all our lives better. Now off you go and take care of my little brother. 

_xx Roxy_

Jake was screwed. He knew as much as he stood on the side of the bed with the computer on his lap and his hands in his hair, gripping and tousling in tandem. He was screwed tight in so many holes he didn’t even know what muscle to move first.

“You’re screwed,” Dirk said, reading over his shoulder and, right, he was on watch duty. So to speak.

Initially, he’d only been very bored after his morning shift and offered to take on Tavros’s watch hours too. Just in case Dirk was still in a surly mood after Jade had laughed at his programs, he’d brought his computer with him too.

Jake looked back at the blonde guy seated on the other half of the bed and sighed forlornly. “You shouldn’t be allowed to read my messages, you know...”

The other blinked slowly before leaning back on the overused pillow. “Say so, next time. Or at least make an effort to hide them.”

Silence was his response. Jake didn’t say anything; he was too preoccupied by the vaguely acquired data and quest. Did Roxy really expect him to lie to Jade, take Dirk while she still wasn’t done with him, and go with him until they reached Nix’s underground facility? Did she really think he could walk that long?

On the one hand, Jade wasn’t as strict about their guest after being allowed to turn his computer’s system inside out, but that didn’t say anything. Neither about her curiosity nor about the other’s secrets. There was no way she could find something Dirk didn’t want her to, if he was what the ID said he was. The check-up only validated that theory.

On the other hand, there were so many things they didn’t know and even Tavros said that the situation in Nix and Golgotha was dire after a few rebellious gangs had been subjected to some undisclosed governmental procedures. Going anywhere near those cities with Dirk was like juggling with a grenade. If his joke about Pompeii was also true, then that metaphor was more accurate than he had intended.

“A penny for your thoughts. When are we going?” he asked when Jake gave up on pulling his hair and instead closed his computer.

Even to his own ears, he sounded tired. “We’re not.”

The other’s tone wasn’t at all surprised, which was nothing new. “Changed your opinion of me already?” he raised two blonde eyebrows, but made no further attempt at an expression.

Jake let out another sigh and fell back on his back, relishing in the sensation the narrow, but nice spot of mattress offered his spine. He hadn’t slept well in a few days, thanks to the continually colder weather and the stabs of frozen pain it sent up his thigh. In any other situation, he wouldn’t have come at such ease in their guest’s bed. At least not when they were both using it at the same time.

Dirk’s elbow nudged a little at his shoulder and Jake realised he had closed his eyes somewhere along his thought process. He didn’t make the effort to open them yet, though. “It’s too dangerous. It’s still not clear who and what you really are and I can’t know for sure you didn’t hack into my data and send me a fake message.” Gosh, the mattress was giving his head a light floating sensation.

“Wow,” Dirk intoned sarcastically. “You just sounded like Harley.”

Jake shrugged as well as he could shrug while lying on his back. “We’re semi-related.”

It didn’t seem like something worth hearing, since Dirk went on as if he’d never spoken. “I thought you could use a little adventure. No offense, but you’re using a captive for entertainment here.”

He liked to think he hadn’t flinched. Which, he probably hadn’t, having become relatively numb to mentions of exploits over the years. At least on the surface. He decided to give him some closure. “I can’t walk that far,” Jake tapped his knee absently. “But since you’re so uncharacteristically eager to go, you should talk Tav into it.”

The other seemed to think it over, if his silence was anything to go by. Jake didn’t have the chance to wait for his next anecdote, because Tavros was calling for him from the hallway. Apparently, lunch had come early and it was badly preserved corn and fresh pine needles.

Maybe if he hadn’t been so tired and so distracted, if the thought of food didn’t revolt him so much, he would have been careful to take his computer away, or at least disable its network connection. But he had been subjected to all those things and his computer remained by their guest’s bed, who risked his first real glance towards it only after Jake had closed the door behind him.


	5. Missed Trails

It was easy for anyone to lose themselves in the smallest details of everyday life. When they couldn’t let their guard down for fear of appearing too weak in front of the city patrols; when they couldn’t look too strong just so they wouldn’t piss off the men in power. When food rations have been started under their noses during the last few wars and never lifted; when everything was decaying and only a few molecules told the difference between their lunch and their furniture. When the world was growing colder by the day.

It was easy to forget to look, to listen, to think when everyone was in a perpetual state of waiting: waiting for something to erupt, to happen, to crash down over them like the hinges of the skies had been cut off. Waiting for something they somehow knew would come. Waiting for the worst. In a way, most of them felt better during wars and revolutions. The threat was more alive than ever, then and at least they were running for their lives, not waiting for death to just come and sweep them from their doorstep.

However, that did not mean there was nothing to look at, to listen to, to think of. On this other nameless day, while John Egbert’s eyes were just opening, slowly, not wanting to face the dreadful weight pressing on his body every morning, the hillocks near Hemera burst with fire. Nine bombs, three for each factory, and thousands of maybe-children had been evaporated from Earth’s plans. The thick air filled with black smoke and smells of burnt skin and rubber and slime, the fog settled down slowly, covering the dead mud with a dark veil of ash and soot, and then it was over. The adult workers had been inside too, so it would make the news and a big number of people would see them. Few to none would listen.

\---

Minutes later, while the debris was still smoking and hissing in the humid fog, John Egbert was finally released by his invisible burden. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he put his head in his hands and scrubbed at his face until his skin was warmed and his eyes saw yellow lights. The cold floor was keeping him anchored to this reality.

He only had to get to the hallway in order to know that something was wrong, even though, yet again, he would not see the big picture. For only a moment, air with the smell of death hit him in the face and he didn’t even blink. That was one moment; the next, he rushed in three big steps and burst through Rose’s door. The smell didn’t stop him the second time, and he got down beside her, in the far corner of the room. Her skin looked almost grey in the morning darkness, a shade that was sicker and more frightening than anything any troll skin could ever achieve and she was trembling all over.

This is too soon, too soon, he was thinking while his hands scrambled over her increasingly thinner form, trying to do something, anything, to show direct her attention to his presence. “Look at me,” he tried to touch her cheek, but she snarled at him, saying nothing, and tried to curl even more into herself.

It was a good thing that he had got used to her fits; back when she had first got ill, the first outburst had came slowly, like an endless cough that stayed with her for a few months. First saliva, then came blood, and, in one of the latest stages, blackness. They only put her in quarantine after she almost puked her guts out in the common room. Dave had been there, yelling for doctors; John had been petrified, unable to move a muscle.

The second time he’d faced it, they were already on a run, in a small rural town. It took all of his willpower not to join her in the act of vomiting, and he had held her shoulders and cleaned her face with his shirt when the goo wasn’t letting her breathe. Afterwards, when she was passed out, he’d had a fun night filled with five puking events.

Now it wasn’t worse than most times. “Rose,” he said again when she was too quiet. “My name’s John. I’m here to help you,” he kneeled on the wooden floor, keeping close, but not trying to touch her anymore. She was standing in a watery pool of black which was soaking her clothes and her hair was stuck to her wet face.

John didn’t have any more throat medicine, so getting something more substantial out of her would leave her almost voiceless for weeks, but, as far as he was concerned, outside was better than inside. He put a hand on her shoulder and, as if on reflex, she retched again, sounds broken and gurgling and finally things were starting to come out. Dead, slithery black things with nearly pink suckers, some of them so wide that he wondered just how big the thing inside her was.

“Stop it,” Rose said in a shuddery whisper while black saliva still poured from her mouth and John grabbed the nearest cloth and handed it to her before she had the chance to tear it out of his hands.

“Breathe,” he said as she bit into the cloth, trying to stop the flow. It was only then, when her hands were up and clenched around the material that he saw the blood flowing down her forearm. “No, that’s...what’s that?” he got closer and tried to get her left arm unhooked in order to inspect it because he hadn’t seen her bleeding from this before. She held her ground. “No, Rose. Rose, show me. You’re bleeding, show me. Rose. Blood. Show me,” he told her on an even tone, all the time while trying to twist her arm.

Finally, she gave it and he turned it, only to see something he really wished he didn’t. A patch of skin on her forearm had been burst open and a black, slimy member was making its way outside. He could only watch as it pushed itself more and more into the world, making the skin tear like cotton in order to make way. 

It smelt even worse. The metallic smell of blood was nothing compared to the almost gaseous one of that thing and John was terrified to catch himself staring without doing anything. Without letting the arm go, he searched his new jacket’s pockets single-handedly and took out the razor from yesterday. Had he anyone to thank for taking it, he would have. He couldn’t know if this would make matters better or worse, but very few things could be worse than this, so he stabbed the thing and cut it off right at the base, leaving a long patch of ripped skin and a tubular, pink interior in sight. Her blood was freely running through his fingers, soaking his pants.

“It wants out,” she said, her voice bubbling with pain and hoarse.

“Yeah,” John took a shuddering breath and attempted to stand. “I’m going to...get a thread and needle. Disinfectant too, yes. Try not to move it. They should be downstairs. I’ll, I’ll bring you some water too. Don’t leave,” he was mostly muttering to himself, letting his own voice guide him to the stairway, keeping his brain busy enough not to lose it. He heard her retch again when he was halfway to the ground floor.

\---

“Like I said for the past two fucking days, it wasn’t your fault. In the worst case scenario, it was ours. These shits happen all the time, no need to pop a vein because of it. Actually, you never did, before. What’s up?”

If it wasn’t for the fact that Karkat had just got out of the shower, with hair dripping wet and ruffled in the most harmless way possible, Dave would have got a headful of nightmares from that glare alone. Days had passed since his incident in Gomorrah and, despite his constant efforts to make Karkat let the matter go, he was continuously failing. On the other hand, had they not been so busy arguing over, by comparison, trivial things, they would have seen the bigger picture much sooner.

Karkat slammed his towel on a chair and resumed his frown. “If I hadn’t gone so soon after we arrived, they would have had second thoughts about ambushing you.”

“So what?” Dave raised an eyebrow, twirling his aviators in his hands. “It wasn’t more than field practice. I’m alright, see?” Which was true, he only had a few bandages over the claw-marks on his throat. “You’re paranoid.”

“I’m not paranoid,” the other mumbled while pulling a white shirt over his head.

Fortunately, Dave knew the problem. “There won’t be another war for at least a few years yet, man. Everyone is still gathering their forces from the last one. I know you’re more used to fanatic equalitarian and freedom fighters, but trust me, there is no big ploy to fail-to-overthrow the government or to decapitate the king or to manslaughter all men and trolls whose names start with a letter T going on for the time being. It’s just your good ol’ abusive totalitarian system and a few lunatics trying to kill people from time to time. Nothing great. You just have to dodge right and you’re fine. Consider this your vacation. Shit knows you deserve one after all that shit you went through a few years back.”

During his speech, Karkat had taken a seat on the chair opposite him and kept himself busy by loading his guns. When Dave was over, he only spared a minute glance at his face. “Vacation my ass. Hopefully I won’t be here for the next war.” He finished the last gun. “Oh and,” he looked theatrically at the ceiling before fixing his eyes on him, “mind your own fucking business for the next sermon.”

Dave grinned as he got two cans of energizer from his backpack and threw one to the troll. “Will do. This was downright embarrassing.” The drink was dark blue and it fizzled unsettlingly on his tongue, but the effect was more or less instant. The miracles of post-invasion technology.

“Tell me about it,” Karkat manages a grin of his own before hiding it in his own can. “Just looking at you blather all that and my self-esteem fell into the dust.”

“I don’t think it needed any help for that.” He got a wet towel thrown at his face.

\---

Although it was unusual for people to get so deep into the forest, they had had guests that morning. Well, it was barely midday, so it could have been said that they were still having them, but from what Jake observed as he looked out the window he knew that situation would not last for long. At the moment, Jade was using the three wondering men as obstacles for Bec. He hadn’t seen the latter in a few months, but Jade had never seemed worried about that absence. 

Bec was an enormous white wolf, or maybe dog, if Jade’s words were to be taken into consideration, whom Jake had first seen in his childhood, when the five-pound puppy was brought to Jade by some traveller. They used to live somewhere deeper inside the mountains, from what he remembered now. They had a woman to take care of them, but he couldn’t remember anything about her apart from the fact that they had called her grandma. He wondered when he’d forgotten. Probably soon after he was old enough to start exploring, when he left and never came back. It was something normal for people to have short-lived memories nowadays.

In any case, now he saw Bec running after the three guys and, a moment later, Jade got inside the house, cheeks and nose reddened by the cold, but otherwise unharmed. Jake watched her from his place in one old armchair lying in the hall. “Are they gone?” he asked, although he knew the answer.

Jade was unzipping her winter jacket with swift, sure movements, but she stopped to smile widely at him. “Yeah!” Then she went on to unlace her boots, talking along the way. “Can you believe them? They had been walking in the cold for days, coming from the mountains in the south, and they must have been starving, I guess, but the first thing they think about when they see me is to lay me down on some barn floor!” 

Jake grimaced. “But they were so old. I thought they were gathering wood when I saw them coming.” 

Jade threw a boot longwise across the hall, tone cheery but strained. “Exactly! Is this what old age does with our minds, Jake? Erase all our priorities and turn us into animals?” The other boot was off too, and she stopped to tap her lips with a finger. “Actually, that’s wrong. Even an animal would deem food more important than sex. Oh, shucks, this is even worse.” She shrugged off her jacket and hanged it a little too forcefully beside the front door. “Don’t ever let me get married, Jake,” she added on a lighter note as she turned her back to him and marched out of the hallway, deeper into the cabin.

 _‘Married’_. Jake had to roll the word in his head for a while before it clicked. He had last seen that word in a book, though, it being ancient, it didn’t have a decent explanation inside it. He got the impression it was some sort of communion for life. He couldn’t recall what its purpose was, exactly.

Then again, it wasn’t exactly what had interested him in the books he’d come across until now. The most interesting ones were the one written before the invasion, obviously, since all the ones written afterwards were just boring, sad history books. In the very old ones, though, he had found description of countless other worlds and of Earth as it was before and, to be fair, he couldn’t make the distinction between those, as the younger Earth seemed like an imaginary place altogether. There were so many things that didn’t make sense, though. So many things that people seemed to have been taking for granted during that time.

For now, though, he took the advantage of being out of her sight and rushed to the storeroom. He had to make packing as swift as possible if they were to stand a chance.

\---

“It yells at night, do don’t even think of sleeping in the city tonight. I don’t want all these meatsuckers on my head,” the old man told him, the web of wrinkles that constituted his face going along with the movement.

John cast a doubtful look at the wrapped package in his hands, but didn’t go as far as to raise an eyebrow. The old man had a club and a problematic temper. “Yeah, okay,” he said instead, and turned to go, not liking the slow way in which the door was closed behind him afterwards. Alas, these were the times and suspicion was blossoming like seeping boils on every man’s mind. It was quite remarkable, John thought, that it had found any new places to grow on. It wasn’t his main problem; at least he would not be the one keeping the package.

It was the fifth delivery he was doing that month, and at least this time he had not been included in a bar brawl. He could see why Vriska refused to go get these herself; it would’ve been hell taking her out of these places.

At least the patrols had thinned down, with the nearby explosions in the hill and all that. Hence the extra amount of misgivings within his peers. John didn’t know, didn’t want to know. Factories were burned down on a weekly basis. It wasn’t his problem. Every instinct his body possessed sent him continuous signals that something was happening. Again, not his issue. Soon enough there would be no more ectolabs standing? Well, so be it for all he cared.

As he went down the winding streets cradling the package casually under one arm, he only had a couple of problems in his mind and they were more than enough. First, Vriska. It was a three-hour walk to the part of the city she dwelled under and he was adamant to get there in less than that. She would get her screaming nightmare, he would get paid, and he could go back to the clinic.

There lied the other issue, no matter how much he disliked thinking of it like that. Rose had closed up like a lost book in the time between her last seizure and now. The stitches on her arm had yet to heal and she was thin as a beggar, no matter how much Jane seemed to feed her. John had proceeded to raise his rent by his own volition in accordance with that. It wasn’t like he needed money for much less, for how much good they did.

Nevertheless, Rose was not getting any better and a few weeks had passed and it still didn’t seem out of the ordinary, but John felt that it was, and he knew he was right. Unless something was done, she would never get better, and they’ve been fools thinking they could outlive the thing inside her. John often thought if she ever believed they had a chance. He tried not to dwell on anything regarding Rose too much, since as soon as he did so his chest and throat started aching in a way he thought he had long forgotten and he wondered, _God, how did I ever forget how much she meant to me_. Because at one point he had foolishly thought seeing what he did as a duty would make it easier to bear.

But Rose had once been his friend and he had truly loved her, enough to risk exile in order to save her from untimely euthanasia. Now they didn’t feel like any of these things, the habit of having each other around, somewhere, having dismissed any friendship they might have dwelt happily into at a time, but it seemed that had not been enough to destroy them.

Looking back, it was funny that he was thinking of these things as he reached the central plaza and felt a gun pushing in his back as soon as he stopped long enough to watch a charcoal-filled cart go by. He didn’t drop the package, he didn’t even blink, ready to get out of it without casualties until he heard that voice.

Saying, “Don’t even think about it.”

It was funny, in perspective, but John only reflected that hours later, while nursing his headache in one of Vriska’s improvised chairs. Right then, it only took him seconds to burst with an anger so alive in his numb body it took him by surprise. 

Before the flame subsided, he dropped the package and in a flash he turned towards his aggressor, gripped his gun arm, twisted it behind his back hard enough to sprain it, and, for a moment, thought. Then he was resolute at seeing a flash of pain in red eyes, and he pressed viciously on the forearm until he felt the bone break. He didn’t hear the yell and he didn’t need to, the vibration of the rupture under his hands more than rewarding enough. Besides, he was so overwhelmed by fury he was hyperventilating.

He picked the parcel by instinct, not at all aware of it, and ran all the way to the underground entrance. Only too late did he think, _crap, I just gave him a free ticket to the clinic_.

\---

Thinking back through the white noise and pain, Dave realised they have thought themselves a little too lucky, a little too good.

They had reached Pompeii with great stealth, dodging through the patches of forest circling it until they found a spot remote enough to risk getting to the outer wall. Quarantined it might have been, but whoever was supposed to guard it had apparently decided their problem didn’t lie in the bombed city anymore. Fucking geniuses, Dave thought, amazed that it only took them a month and so to realise that anything of importance had either fled or got destroyed at the same time with the rest.

There hadn’t been any more distress signals sent to their base, so Dave couldn’t be sure which of these assumptions was correct. Still, Karkat begrudgingly assured him the guy in question had fled. Dave found himself unaffected by the whole issues; double-agents had never been his favourite people.

From inside, they took three days to scan all the gates of the city, which was naturally like swimming through an ocean of marble bricks and sharp iron bars. It wasn’t a good experience and Dave had confidently claimed at the time that he would not be coming there for his next birthday. Karkat had given him the unimpressed look of one that had long since forgotten his birth date because he knew he always had minimal chances of living to reach another. Year after year.

They found a faint trail of steps leading up to the mountains, close to an improvised niche in the wall, and it wasn’t that surprising that the patrols hadn’t noticed it. Only madmen ventured to take the mountain path these days and even going close to the base of them seemed like asking for trouble.

Talking of madmen, of course they went that way. After all, it was their third day of searching and they hadn’t seen any signs of fleeing population yet. There hadn’t been many survivors, Dave had expected that much, but this was ridiculous. Stupidly, it was the first time it occurred to him that the gates might have been shut down too.

So they checked the maps and went on their death walk to Hemera, and if it wasn’t for the constant drowning fog and jelly rain, Dave might have commented on the permanently constipated look Karkat’s face had assumed ever since they named that town.

Now he was cursing through his teeth and yes, of course they’ve been wrong. Of course there had been another trail, somewhere, anywhere they hadn’t paid enough attention. Of course Egbert had been in one of the only main cities disconnected from the underground network. Fool’s intuition, of course, but he really doubted him being here the entire time. Serket would have smelled him in a bigger city than this one.

Nobody paid much attention to their encounter just a few moments ago; people weren’t impressed or disturbed by much these days. So Dave lay there kneeling on the pavement, trying and failing to find a stop he could grab on his left hand, groaning under his breath and seething.

“What—” he heard Karkat before he saw him, since there was obviously not much he could see through the pain, and fucking damn it, if Egbert wanted to break his arm he could have done it in a cleaner fashion. He obviously knew that too; nobody broke a bone so haphazardly by accident. “Holy shit, are you alright? What the fuck did you do?”

Dave almost laughed; apparently, the whole world thought it was his fault. “Got bored and wanted to play doctor but you weren’t there,” he grunted in pain, thus making the statement dull, and got to his feet, keeping his eyes on the protrusions under his left forearm. “Okay, I’ve got to fix this, give me a backpack and I’ll find a ditch to patch this up somehow.” That had taken all breath out of him and left him standing and gasping for air that stopped in his throat at every new spark of pain.

Karkat had been watching him from a relative distance the entire time, arms crossed and expression brooding and frowning. The suggestion seemed to drag him back to the world of the living, though, if only because he looked up. “No, actually. I saw some sort of sickbay somewhere in that direction,” and he untangled an arm to point to Dave’s right. Go there and act as civil as you can.”

Even through the white-hot pain, Dave found himself blinking at him. “You’re joking, right? Do you know how many soldiers can be there?”

“There aren’t any, I heard— I’ll tell you later. Point is, go there and wait for me.”

That was vaguer than the morals of the royalty, which was a lot to say, and Dave straightened his shoulders. “Where are you going?”

“That way,” he looked behind Dave and, as he turned, he saw the street Egbert had ran towards and felt a metallic taste coat his mouth at the thought that maybe the other knew. “I’ll go underground and contact Captor from there. Won’t be long.”

Dave let out a relieved shuddering breath. “Am I not getting a piggyback ride to the doctor?”

“Maybe just if you drop dead, which won’t surprise me taking into consideration how that looks,” Karkat raised an eyebrow at his arm and Dave grimaced as he saw the state it had gone into. “Hurry up.”

So, realising the blessing his partner had bestowed upon him by not pursuing the true cause of his wound, Dave complied. If only the feeling that he was throwing himself in very deep, very sticky shit hadn’t been masked by the pain, he would have ran in the opposite direction; and be all that smarter for that too.

\---

This was the stupidest thing he had done all his life and he’d used to go around the continent in his teenage years, looking for adventure. Without guns, the first two years. Yep; Jake was, in the worst senses of the word, screwed. He would only be too lucky if he lived long enough for Jade to find him and beat the living lights out of him.

No; most likely, he would die within the month. They both would, if he was as good a talisman of bad luck as he felt nowadays. Poor Tavros, left with one more shift in his schedule and an altruistic duty to listen to Jade anger as she caught on to the facts. The last time Jake had seen him he was trying to make the blue caffeine look blacker. The last time he saw Jade, she was going to sleep, still very amused by marriages. Jake could only hope these would not be his last memories of friendly faces.

Jake was a fool. He felt like this wasn’t enough, so he put it into words, “I’m a bloody fool,” he spat out, walking as fast as he could over the damp forest ground while his prosthetic leg kept on getting stuck in its own articulations.

“Idiot, more accurately,” the other responded from a good distance ahead and then slowed his pace as to let Jake get closer before going on. “Fool may imply that something has fooled you. Idiot has to do with genetics.”

“Well, aren’t I _glad_ to have such an expert by my side as I run towards my death,” Jake snapped, short of breath and even shorter of temper.

Dirk wasn’t helping. “Not much running you’re doing there, though.”

It irked him more than the premonition of heavy, thick guilt that would surely land on him sooner or later. “Why the fuck did you even need me with you in the first place? You obviously know your way around,” and he made a vague sweep of his arm to take in their surroundings and how Dirk was apparently leading the way. It made the one in question scrunch his eyebrows in a reflecting expression.

“Wrong. I’m mostly going forward aimlessly and waiting for you to call me out on it if I go in the wrong direction.”

With how empty his lungs were, Jake found it hard to groan as loudly as he’d intended. If it hadn’t been for Roxy’s urgent demands, he would have been on his morning shift right now. If it hadn’t been for her, he would have continued boring himself to death. Jake didn’t know how he felt about that.

“Where did you say you guys kept that emergency jet hidden?”

\---

Out of nothing else to do, John had taken to pressing a bag of artificial ice to his bruised elbow. He had expected such a fast movement not to leave him unscathed, but he hadn’t actually felt the pain until he was a mile away from where he’d walked into Dave. Where Dave’s gun had walked into his back, more correctly. Why didn’t it surprise him, he thought with a bitter grin.

Vriska was equally unimpressed when he got to her desk, and then began to grow even more so as she inspected her package. “This thing is almost dead, John. What did you do, play ball with it?” and maybe something in his expression told her the truth, or maybe his thoughts were loud enough for her to hear, but she left it at that and disappeared down the metal hall with the delivery.

He had been using the boxes beside her desk as a recliner for close to an hour and his heartbeat was finally settling down when the computer screens faded from blue to black and got filled with distress signals again. Vriska had mentioned that she had only partially fixed the hack (though not in so many words, and more through intelligently directed glares).

Well. It wasn’t like John had anything better to do. Certainly breaking a few codes would be better for him than brooding in the long run. He could just get up and—  
The sound of footsteps from the opposite direction of Vriska’s destination decided it for him. He was up and in her chair within the second, face in the screens and back to the rest of the world. The best way to disguise himself was in plain sight. He had the uniform, he had the agonizing self-loathing face that decorated the complexions of every trainee, and he could type. He was set.

There was a way to get to the second half of the hallway without going inside the computer room, of course, and John wished that whoever was out there would feel some divine mercy and take that one, but apparently she was especially sought out this time. If the scrutinizing frown John glanced at in the top-left monitor was anything to go by.

“Is Serket in?” the other asked and John felt his right hand tremble over the keys from stress. Upon looking at it, it was perfectly still.

“She...went to the vaults,” he swallowed any further hesitations this time. “I don’t know when she’ll come back.”

“Well,” the one behind him said and, horrifyingly, sat down on the emptied box-chair. John swore under his breath and types faster. “Not before this time tomorrow, if she’d left you to do all her work for her.”

“Yeah, probably,” John laughed without humour at the screens and assessed the situation. A fugitive caught barely an hour after hurting an agent, in an empty underground room and un-hacking Timaeus’s codes. Oh, he was doing brilliantly. He didn’t even try making the other go away any further.

“Are you still getting rid of that?”

With this occasion, he found out that grinning hurt his face, and decided never to attempt it again. “I’m trying,” but what he was trying was to act as casual as possible.  
A hard thing to do, when seconds later the screens turned back to blue and the hack was gone. John blinked at the light, wondering what, of all things, he’d done wrong. Then it hit him; he had solved it too fast.

For hazard’s sake, he turned his head to give the other a confused look. He got a mildly impressed one in turn. “That was faster than our technician.”

John was finding it really hard not to let his eye twitch. “Beginner’s luck.”

Red-tinted eyes stared at him way too intensely for his liking. He really didn’t like the feeling that other people actually saw him. Not when the other people were probably ones that would not hesitate to put a bullet through his skull. “I don’t doubt it.”

 _Liar, liar_ , John’s instinct to flee was chanting. And he should have listened to it that instant, because it was going to get a lot worse.

“Vantas!” Vriska’s voice echoed from the hall and she was beside John before he even attempted to get out of her chair. “Am I happy to see your loser mug.” She was grinning from ear to ear, all sharp teeth and blue lips and John really had to get out of there soon, he was sure now. “Such coincidences,” she continued and this time her hand came to rest on the back of John’s neck, keeping him in place. Her fingers were strong and cold and already feeling like an execution blade. They might as well have been, for all that she said. “What brings you to my humble lair?”

While John was trying with as much subtlety as his terrified self could muster to look around for a way out, the other scowled and squared his shoulders. “I was close by. Figured the transmission would be better from down here than through our devices outside.”

Vriska beamed, pointed nails still on the point of digging into John’s throat. “Why so chatty, all of a sudden? You never bothered to call _me_ when you were on the other side of the world.”

“I prefer to keep the toxic influences in my life to a bare minimum, thank you very much,” the other grumbled.

Small talk was good. There was no other way to go than the one he’d come in, John had come to accept that. He didn’t have a gun, but he had a hunting knife hidden somewhere under his jacket, and that would have been a relief if he were stupid enough to think it would protect him. He couldn’t, for the life of him, fathom why he’d thought Vriska would hide him in a direct confrontation.

“Consider my feelings scantily hurt. Now, where’s the other one? No way did your protocol-loving pan let you come so far without a partner.” The other glared even more and, yes, John thought, that was his chance. While they were too busy riling up, he could slip out of the way. He’d have to be fast; very, very fast. He moved as far as one centimetre before Vriska pulled him by the neck back down. “And you know,” she said with no difference in her tone perhaps except for it being a little more cheery, “I personally think Strider cannot wait to get his hands on his one again.”

The other’s brows scrunched a little bit more in confusion before he turned his head to look John in the face, and John knew, right then and there, that if he was ever gonna get killed by someone, it would be this one. If anything, he thought he would be able to keep some of his dignity intact in that case. And that was a nice thought, since the situation didn’t promise him much longer to live.

\---

The clinic had not been hard to find, but the pain had made Dave’s legs wobble slightly. Actually, it wasn’t necessarily the amount of pain his brain was signalling, but its kind. He could go through burns and bullets and cuts like a champion, but give him a broken bone and he was done for. One more think he’d have to thank Egbert for if he ever got the pleasure to see him again. Just before he’d strangle him.

The doctor was...human, frankly spoken. She was the most human person Dave had seen in months, and it was comforting, but he couldn’t exactly put his finger of the reason behind it. Most likely it had something to do with how her gooey stuff was alleviating his pain.

“This looks pretty bad. And I haven’t even put it through an X-ray yet.” She looked up at him from where she was musing over his bruised skin, and blinked with big blue eyes. “I was not going to lie.” Dave felt a little nauseous. He remembered seeing that expression when he’d tried to force John into confessing he’d stolen his comics once; they’d been fourteen.

“It’s fine,” he choked on his own words and cursed himself for it, looking away from her. There had been a couple more people waiting on her when he’d come in, but they had been swiftly dismissed with an exchange of bags and bottles of medicine. Now they were quite alone, and since his arm was steadily growing number, in a way that would have been alarming in any other situation, Dave casually took in his surroundings.

Clean but cluttered, sterile but old. He almost felt like in an archive, with more medicine and less history. Something was burning on his forehead, in a latent way, the kind of pressure that usually meant somebody was staring at him. Intensely.

Doubtful, he looked around until he found the source. It was such a dark corner, leading into an even darker stairway, that he wouldn’t have lingered on it if it hadn’t been for that feeling. It took a disastrous amount of time for the bits to click together.

Then his breath died in his throat.

\---

The last line of trees went past them and Jake would have gasped if the wind hadn’t been hard on his face. In fact, he gasped anyway. He hadn’t seen the sky without peeking at it through a dozen thousand branches in years. It looked, well, it didn’t look so good, with that grey-yellow thing it had going on, but it was _there_. It was there and it was gigantic and Jake was happy.

He was happy for as long as a few minutes before the dread of what he was doing hit him squarely in the heart, and he clung tighter to Dirk’s jacket, thankful for how the other’s computer was digging into his chest. There was a rocky land waste lying ahead of them, but there was a hint of black buildings in the far distance. Jake’s gut tugged at him, but he couldn’t say whether it was out of danger or delight. He hadn’t felt either of those ever since he’d been stranded in that forest.

Sure, maybe he could have done it without semi-harbouring a fugitive hunted by the government, and also while being scarcely more prepared, but sometimes these things happened. He was constantly assuring himself he had done worse things in his life. He didn’t dare to think of one, though.

\---

If it felt strange, it felt real. With purulent wounds in the shape of explosions all over the land, everything was festering. People were walking the surface with a vague intuition, but not enough to form the thought that they were the last people on Earth. If pregnant women started to die, it wasn’t the scientists’ fault; they hadn’t had to deal with this in decades. Of course it wasn’t their fault. They were getting fired for it, too.

If it felt stranger, it was true. There was a hunger in the land, and a reckoning still to be reckoned. When so many dead people were still walking the earth and so many of them weren’t yet aware of it. The hunger was not theirs, though. It was hidden, deep inside rotting cavities filled with pus and crumbling bones. But it was there, just out of plain sight.


End file.
